According to Wang Guangle’s own explanation, the original idea behind Coffin Paint came from a folk custom practiced in his hometown located in Fujian, in which the elderly add one layer of paint to a coffin each year, until their death. Apart from providing a means by which to “materialise the temporal”, Wang Guangle confesses that the appeal of this custom also resides in the fact that it grants a juncture at which his own system of language can be reconsolidated and restructured. The surface of Coffin Paint corresponds to the continued construction of the view that time is indeed “limited”, however, the traces left by the artist on both the front of the painting and through the cross section found along the frame of the painting clearly correspond with a view of time as “unlimited”. In this respect the Coffin Paint series function as an unconventional physical manifestation of Wang Guangle’s own “law of the hourglass”. All seems to become organic and interactive, the space of thought free and unobstructed. In this unfettered environment, all concepts have the connotation of being “twinned”. For example, Wang Guangle consciously adds layer upon layer of thin paint to reach a final point of “density”. On the foundation of “density”, the singular “plane” is transformed to constitute a work of “limited three-dimensional space”.

Zhao Li, Terrazzo and Coffin Paint: A critique of the Art of Wang Guangle