ROTTERDAM.- Evelyn Taocheng Wang is the winner of the Dolf Henkes Prize 2019, the biennial award given to an image-defining Rotterdam artist. Jury chair Fons Hof, director of Art Rotterdam, announced the winner on Thursday evening at TENT Rotterdam. The jury praised Wang for the depth, credibility and exemplariness of her work. The works of the winner and of the other nominees, Roxette Capriles, Priscila Fernandes and Emma van der Leest, are on view at TENT until Sunday 17 February. Evelyn Taocheng Wang wins the Dolf Henkes Prize 2019 and €12,000.

The jury report
The jury is delighted to see how Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s work alternates between poetry and reality, combining them to create a bigger narrative, in which her personal presence is always the guiding principle. Her beautiful drawings, animations and films are credible, elusive and disturbing. Her work seems calm and casual, yet one quickly notices appearances can be deceiving, and it has a charge not easily captured in words. Within the overall configurations of her installations, she knowingly tempts the viewer to see other outlooks and associations.

The winner
In 2016, Evelyn Taocheng Wang (Chengdu, China, 1981) won both the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prize in the Netherlands and the Dorothea von Stetten Prize in Germany. In her series ‘Massage near me’, she shared her experiences of working in a Chinese massage parlour in Amsterdam's Red Light District. Wang trained in traditional Chinese painting and studied art at the Städeschule in Frankfurt and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Dolf Henkes Prize jury 2019
This year's jury is Fons Hof (director of Art Rotterdam), Ingrid Commandeur (art critic and MA Fine Art course director at the Piet Zwart Institute), Tirzo Martha (sculptor and performance artist), and Katarina Zdjelar (Dolf Henkes Prize winner in 2016). The jury’s choice was made from artists grounded in different disciplines, that tie together activism, engagement and aesthetics, and who are looking for their place in a globalized world. ‘We tried to ensure the diversity of these positions is reflected in the nominations. We succeeded in this, although it transpired the nominees for the prize were female. We should like to emphasize this is neither an intention nor a statement by the jury. We considered artists who have a bond with Rotterdam or Curaçao and, of course, quality was an essential criterion.’- says Fons Hof.

The Dolf Henkes Prize 2019
The Dolf Henkes Prize is awarded every two years to an image-defining Rotterdam artist. €12,000 is given on behalf of artist Dolf Henkes (1903–1989), who leaves behind his legacy.