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Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born 1981 in Chengdu, China; lives in Rotterdam) will be honoured with the 31st Wolfgang Hahn Prize of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig. The award ceremony will take place on Friday, 7 November 2025 at 18:30 during Art Cologne at 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.

About the Wolfgang Hahn Prize

The Wolfgang Hahn Prize is awarded annually by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig, and will be awarded for the 31st time in 2025. The award is primarily intended to honour contemporary artists who have already made a name for themselves in the art world through an internationally recognised oeuvre, but who are not yet as well known in Germany as they deserve to be. The prize money, totalling a maximum of 100,000 euros, is made up of the members’ contributions and goes towards the acquisition of a work or group of works by the artists for the Museum Ludwig collection. The prize is associated with exhibitions organised by the Museum Ludwig of the work(s) acquired by the prizewinners and the publication of an accompanying publication.

The name of the prize honours the memory of the passionate Cologne collector and painting restorer Wolfgang Hahn (1924-1987), who was committed in many ways to the art of the European and American avant-garde in Cologne. The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst is indebted to his exemplary work as a collector, as a founding member and as head of the restoration workshops at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and the Museum Ludwig.

The previous winners of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize are:
2024 Anna Boghiguian
2023 Francis Alÿs
2022 Frank Bowling
2021 Marcel Odenbach
2020 Betye Saar
2019 Jac Leirner
2018 Haegue Yang
2017 Trisha Donnelly
2016 Huang Yong Ping
2015 Michael Krebber / R.H. Quaytman
2014 Kerry James Marshall
2013 Andrea Fraser
2012 Henrik Olesen
2011 John Miller
2010 Peter Fischli, David Weiss
2009 Christopher Wool
2008 Peter Doig
2006 Mike Kelley
2005 Richard Artschwager
2004 Rosemarie Trockel
2003 Niele Toroni
2002 Isa Genzken
2001 Raymond Pettibon
2000 Hubert Kiecol
1999 Pipilotti Rist
1998 Franz West
1997 Cindy Sherman
1996 Günther Förg
1995 Lawrence Weiner
1994 James Lee Byars