Evelyn Taocheng Wang: An Equivocal Contrast is the catalogue published in connection with Wang’s 2023 solo exhibition of the same title at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition beyond Euro-America, it brought together seventeen new works, twelve of which form a Chinese album imagining a dialogue between Eileen Chang and Agnes Martin. For Wang, Chang and Martin are not simply references or influences, but “readymade personalities” invited into her “powder box of art”: figures whose gestures, temperaments, and tones she borrows, reapplies, and reimagines through painting.

The book extends this idea of painting as correspondence. At its center is the complete exchange between Wang and fellow painter Hao Liang. Although the two artists had admired each other’s work for years, they first met in person on the opening day of An Equivocal Contrast. Their encounter unfolded into a friendship and a series of email exchanges, in which they move freely from Tang poet Li Shangyin to Japanese painter Toko Shinoda, and between philosophy and technique, brushwork and biography, narrative and material.

The book presents reproductions of 17 works, gathered in a condensed centerfold section consisting of a thread-sewn booklet of 104 pages printed on thicker reproduction paper. The idea was to keep the epistolary exchange separated from the works, doing so by literally surrounding the core paintings of the book with Xuan paper, on which the letter exchange would be printed on. The book also presents documentation of three performances that occurred during the period of the exhibition.

Edited and introduced by X Zhu-Nowell, presenting a correspondence between Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Hao Liang
Managing editor: Zhen Pan

Publishers: Rockbund Art Museum, Mousse Publishing
Year: 2026
Size: 23.2 × 23 cm
Pages: 104
Languages: English / Chinese
Binding: Cloth Softcover
ISBN 978-88-6749-739-3

Evelyn Taocheng Wang – An Equivocal Contrast