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THERE IS NO ONE THING that we could call the “immigrant experience,” but certainly everyone who has immigrated is familiar with how mundane misunderstandings can reveal cultural tectonics, of how humor can sometimes be mobilized to leaven pain. What’s the correct time of day to introduce yourself to a new neighbor? How earnestly should you respond to the question “How are you?” Will you come off as suspicious to the neighbors if your curtains remain drawn? The answers to these questions might seem relative or merely dependent on personal proclivity, yet one’s approach to these everyday situations constitutes, in part, the je ne sais quoi of national belonging. And while learning a new culture can be refined into a science, other qualities will still mark us as different, factors comprising who we are, where we come from, and our appearance.
China-born, Netherlands-based artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang takes the subject of authenticity, and how we go about performing it, as fodder for a sprawling practice that includes installation, performance, video, sculpture, and a range of painting and drawing styles. Her work often touches on Dutchness and Germanness, pairing observations on immigration and belonging with reflections on other aspects crucial to our understanding of the self, such as our gender and class presentation or our sense of style. Yet she eschews a confrontational approach to these hot-button topics, broaching themes such as cultural assimilation and gender expression with a healthy sense of humor and poetry, making references in her work to art history, language acquisition, literature (she has a fondness for Virginia Woolf, Chinese-born American modernist Eileen Chang, and the Brothers Grimm’s “The Frog Prince”), and embodied experience (such as the way in which daylight filters through the seventeenth-century windows of the Amsterdam Hermitage). Wang knowingly emphasizes personal appearance and material possessions—her work frequently invokes clothing brands and makes use of garments and textiles—in ways that fly in the face of so much European and American art of the past fifty years, with its grounding in supposedly objective and neutral Conceptualism and cerebral claims to criticality. When speaking of her instructors at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, she expresses surprise at their analytic approach, saying, with wry bewilderment, of one (white male) teacher, “He can even explain what...