Wang Guangle, Coffin Paint 240718, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm ? Wang Guangle

Pace announces a focused exhibition of new works by Wang Guangle to be held at its Seoul gallery. On view from September 4 to October 26, this presentation, titled Wang Guangle and coinciding with Frieze Seoul, marks the artist’s first-ever solo show in South Korea. Wang will present three never-before-exhibited paintings within a site-specific construction in the gallery space, bringing together works from his Untitled and Coffin Paint series. Wang’s presentation with Pace in Seoul will shed light on his interest in exploring time as a universal element that can only be experienced, rather than described.

Known for his process-based paintings centering on temporality and physicality, Wang has long been interested in the tension between form and meaning, a relationship that informs his unique syntax of abstraction. Much of the artist’s work originates from deeply personal and existential ideas from mundane sources.

Inspired by a tradition from his hometown Fujian, where elders annually lacquer their coffins in an act of contemplating death, Wang’s Coffin Paint series examines themes of life and mortality, capturing memories and intuitive emotions through his repeated and ritualistic application of pigments. In these works, layers of paint produce distinctly textured and intricate surfaces. For a colorful new composition from this body of work, on view in his upcoming Seoul exhibition, Wang experimented with a new technique, orienting the canvas vertically when applying paint to this vibrant work, ceding a great degree of control to gravity.

In paintings from the artist’s Untitled series, which he began in 2007, rectangular lines from the periphery of the canvas create an illusionistic portal within the composition. Each layer records traces of actions of Wang’s hand and body, thereby making his physical relationship to the canvas a central concern of the work, both in its process and finished state.

Wang’s specially built installation for his three paintings will offer visitors to Pace’s Seoul gallery a window into his world. Emphasizing organic forms and enactments of interconnectedness, the installation will cultivate a free and unconstrained space that invites thought and contemplation.

About the Artist

Wang Guangle (b. 1976, Songxi, Fujian Province, China), a pioneer of abstract and conceptual painting among his generation, studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he began exploring the potential of the painting surface as integral to his work. In 2003, he co-founded N12, a collective of twelve fellow graduates who began showing together as a means of securing exhibition space at a time when emerging Chinese art had yet to assert its place in the art market or critical discourse. The group came to represent a generation of diverse artists who developed their work two decades after the Cultural Revolution, unified by a break from formal representation toward individual expression. Wang quickly garnered critical praise for his process-based paintings, wherein the artist translates abstract qualities of the world—such as the passage of time—into paint, simultaneously referring to the materiality of the medium and the act of painting through abstraction and repetition. In April 2021, Wang opened his fourth solo exhibition at Beijing Commune titled Waves. In recent years, the artist has presented several major solo exhibitions at Pace’s New York and London galleries.

About the Exhibition

Dates: September 4 – October 26, 2024 

Venue: Pace Gallery, Seoul

Address: 267 Itaewon-ro Seoul

Courtesy of Pace Gallery.