Romanesco im Max-Mara-Mantel
Evelyn Taocheng Wang's first institutional solo exhibition in Italy, "Sweet Landscape," opens at the Museion in Bolzano. The Chinese-born, Rotterdam-based artist presents silk paintings, pastel canvases, and painted garments that probe the region's complex history beneath its idyllic Alpine scenery. Works such as "Frog Princess Checks Her Smartphone in front of Window of August Macke’s Hat Shop" (2026) and "Ancient Roman bust for Sale" (2026) blend local food motifs, cultural translation, and hybrid identity, questioning who gets to write history and how landscapes are perceived through secondhand experiences.
The exhibition matters because it uses Bolzano's contested past—once part of Austria-Hungary, then Italianized under Mussolini—as a concrete stage for Wang's ongoing themes of cultural translation, memory, and the friction between self-perception and external attribution. Curated by Leonie Radine, the show offers a witty yet confrontational lens on how clichés and power structures shape our understanding of place, making it a timely meditation on identity and belonging in a globalized art world.