Evelyn Taocheng Wang

Billboards Kortrijk is a long-term art project in public space at Budabrug, Kortrijk. The billboards are selected from Billboard Series’ archive and are presented here within a new narrative. The first five presentations in Kortrijk focus on the artist portrait. Billboards Kortrijk wants to build a sustainable and productive dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood and urban landscape, and introduce a broad audience to different visual languages and ways of looking at the world.

Billboards Kortrijk is a project of artlead, together with Be-Part Center for Contemporary Art and 019. Billboards Kortrijk is curated by Thomas Caron and takes place within a scenography by architect Olivier Goethals.

EVELYN TAOCHENG WANG
Frog Prince, 2018

Evelyn Taocheng Wang (b. 1981, Chengdu, CN) connects personal memories and fantasies with larger themes of identity, sexuality, ethnicity and gender in her work. She explores these themes through painting, video, installation and performance. The core of her practice has to do with the idea that the body is culturally relative, that how a body acquires meaning varies according to the time and place it is in. In her work, she questions how our identity is determined and how this identity relates to our bodies.

Frog Prince was created in the context of her film Three versions of change. The film is about stories and mythologies that have been written, adapted and retold over time in different cultural contexts. Wang pays particular attention in the film to the fairy tale of The Princess and the Frog. There are different versions of the story, but they all deal with transformation. The focus is on the different identities associated with the bodies as they change shape. Throughout three different versions of the story, the idea that identity is fluid and adaptable unfolds. The drawing on the billboard also appears in this film, showing the artist lying next to a frog and talking about how she would like to decorate her room. Here she refers to a tradition of the Chinese Ming dynasty of alternating light and dark rooms and decorating them with peaches and rice cakes. This tradition was revived by Chinese writer Eileen Chang’s influential essay Written on Water (1945).