Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born in Chengdu, China, in 1981; lives in Rotterdam) has been awarded the 31st Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Society for Modern Art at the Museum Ludwig. The award ceremony took place on Friday, November 7, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. during Art Cologne at the Museum Ludwig.

In her drawings, paintings, video works, installations and performances, Wang combines personal memories and fantasies with universal themes such as identity, authenticity and ethnicity. Her work is influenced by traditional Chinese as well as Western modern and contemporary art. She also draws on content from classical fairy tales, colonial history and queer theory. She translates research findings and historiography into painting and drawing in fluid transitions using minimalism, conceptual art and forms of appropriation. Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s multi-layered and often paradoxical narratives shake up categorical notions of perception and judgement in a stimulating way.

Guest juror Susanne Titz explains the jury’s decision: ‘Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s work is very touching because it breaks with the abstract, detached and museal that is still associated with fine art today in a very personal and emotional way. Her drawings in traditional Chinese techniques of writing and painting are like commentaries on Western culture, becoming intimate, like a private poetry that presents itself as non-conformist and outrageous. Evelyn Taocheng Wang has a special power to bring her own identity into the work: the migrant, the sexual, the everyday felt and the culturally educated. Her visual work, text and performance deal with the shimmering of identity and the fact that art and literature can actually provide thoughts and ideas for one’s own life. The ability to breathe, ‘don’t stop to breathe’, is one of her beautiful terms for this survival.’

‘I am delighted that Evelyn Taocheng Wang has been awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize 2025. In her work, she deals with her own cultural localisation and the art histories of Europe, America and China in a sensitive and often surprising way. She is an artist whose work will fit perfectly into the Museum Ludwig collection and set new accents,’ explains Yilmaz Dziewior, Director of the Museum Ludwig and member of the jury.

Mayen Beckmann, Chairman of the Board of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst, adds: ‘A work by Evelyn Taocheng Wang for the collection of the Museum Ludwig ties in perfectly with the passion for collecting of the married couple Peter and Irene Ludwig, who were interested in ancient Chinese art from the very beginning and made a large donation of contemporary art to the Chinese National Museum in Beijing via the Ludwig Foundation in 1996. The Ludwigs enriched the Cologne collection early on with works by artists of Chinese origin such as Cai Guo-Quiang and Yan Pei Ming. In Germany, Wang’s works are not yet as well known as the uniqueness of her artistic position deserves.’

Since the space-filling exhibition of Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s works in the central pavilion of the 2024 Biennale di Venezia, the artist has become known to a wider international audience. After studying traditional Chinese art, classical Chinese literature, graphic design and visual communication in Nanjing, China, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her works have been shown in solo exhibitions at the Museum Dordrecht, the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf and the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, among others. She received the ABN AMRO Art Award in Amsterdam and the Dorothea von Stetten Art Prize.

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Press release from the Museum Ludwig.