Dutch multidisciplinary artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang has been announced as the recipient of the 31st Wolfgang Hahn Prize 2025. The award ceremony will take place on November 7, 2025 at Museum Ludwig in Cologne during next year’s Art Cologne.
The Wolfgang Hahn Prize, named after the Cologne collector and painting restorer, is awarded annually by the Museum Ludwig’s patrons’ club. The prize celebrates contemporary artists with internationally recognized bodies of work who deserve greater recognition in Germany. The awarded artist receives €100,000 ($104,900). Previous winners include Egyptian Canadian artist Anna Boghiguian in 2024 and Belgian artist Francis Alÿs in 2023.
Wang is particularly known for her integration of traditional Chinese techniques into her works that reference Western modern and conceptual art. Her practice—spanning drawings, paintings, installations, performances, and video art—explores themes such as identity, authenticity, and cultural complexity, with pieces referencing folklore, historical text, and queer theory.
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,” said guest juror and author Susanne Titz. “[She] has a special power to bring her own identity into the work: the migrant, the sexual, the everyday felt, and the culturally educated.”
Wang, who currently lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands, was featured in the Artsy Vanguard in 2019. Her work was also selected for inclusion in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale, where it was presented in the central pavilion. There, her series of inventive grid paintings, “Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time,” takes inspiration from Canadian American artist Agnes Martin’s Minimalist grid patterns and East Asian principles like Taoism.
