Opening: Thursday 24 September, 6—9pm

Audio descriptions for all artworks in the exhibition are available here on our website, and on MP3 players at the gallery reception. Click here for a transcript.

Being Poetic Ruins Life is Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s (b. Chengdu, China) first institutional exhibition in the UK. It features existing and newly commissioned works across painting, textile, installation, and video, gathered to create a ‘womb’ from within which Wang navigates Western and Chinese art history, and fantasies of British culture. The title refers to the rigorous training that Chinese poets and artists (exclusively privileged men) underwent historically, for whom it was compulsory to withdraw from life to make art. Wang asks who gets to be ‘poetic’, and whose nostalgia forms the basis for those poetics. She proposes a different artistic position; the ‘Cultural Whore’ who, steered by desire, wit, and elegance, builds her own narratives from cultural fragments.

The exhibition introduces early works, from 2008 onward, that examine fashion, language, and image as ways of navigating fluid identities, as well as works made for CCA that incorporate British cultural referents such as Virginia Woolf, Count Duckula, James Bond, Pride and Prejudice, and Merchant Ivory films, alongside two dominant figures in Wang’s work; Asian American writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995) and Abstract-Expressionist painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004). 

Wang’s “eyeshadow palette of art history” assembles references, conversations, and imitations through disarming humour and high skill, in defiance of hierarchies between high and low, East and West. Collaging motifs and techniques across her works allows Wang to negotiate complex poles of identity, from gender and sexuality, to language and cultural belonging, whilst teasing essentialism and categorisation. Her navigation of Britain is replete with projections and knowing mistranslations, modelling the ways in which we assemble partial narratives and identifications in a globalised and image-saturated existence. 

Painter Agnes Martin is a central figure in Wang’s later works, and this gallery brings together existing and new paintings that mimic the artist’s compositions. Wang interrupts the universalist modernity of Martin’s large-scale abstractions with overlaid forms drawn from literati painting – such as calligraphic text and seals – and gongbi-style motifs (painted with meticulous lines) that depict a cast of characters plucked from literary history and popular culture. Wang’s use of Martin can be read as a way in which to queer Western histories of modernism from the position of an outsider, or Eastern interloper, stealing back from a canon that stole from the East, and imposing her own forms that speak to the complex image exchanges that runs between cultures.

Wang graduated from a stringent art education in China, mastering calligraphy and ink painting according to the literati tradition. Literati is a refined style of Chinese painting informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, that combines calligraphy, poetry, and ink painting. Despite the strictures of her education, Wang’s nascent practice was also fed by aspects of popular and global culture that cut against elevated literati art making, including exhibition catalogues and art history books, Western and Hong Kong New Wave DVD’s, pop music, fashion, Japanese graphic design, and translated fiction.

Moving to Europe to continue her studies in 2008, Wang had to contend with a lack of understanding of Chinese art forms amongst her peers. Her ink paintings were termed ‘drawings’ and demoted to the status of a painting study, and the Xuan paper she used was misnamed ‘rice paper’. She retaliated by calling oil paintings ‘potato’ and ‘bread’ paintings. Wang’s experience of cultural mistranslation and diasporic outsider status would come to be central to her work, providing tools through which to queer Chinese traditions which she wished to enliven, and European ones that othered her.

SUPPORTED BY
Carlos/Ishikawa, London
Antenna Space, Shanghai
The Evelyn Taocheng Wang Exhibition Circle
Joan Thewsey Legacy Gift
Mondriaan Fund

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