User:Timo van Dijk
Museum Of Fantastic Forgeries
Wang Guangle - Coffin Paint
Coffin Paint is a serie of paintings based on the production idea of painting multiple layers of acrylic paint over a period of time. The piece Coffin Paint 131127 (2013) I chose is build out of strokes of white and black paint which Guangle applied two times a day, creating a pattern of thin organic lines. The power behind his series of paintings is the idea and production behind it. It is based on an old Chinese part of culture, in which the Chinese prepare their coffins during their last years.
""...the "Coffin Paints" have a very specific cultural reference: It is customary for some Chinese, as they reach late middle age, to purchase their coffin and repaint it every year, thus hoping to achieve longevity. Wang imagines that his pigment asks to live.""
-mutualart.com 2009 Link-
Guangle used this idea of painting to create different paintings with the same technique.
In a way his way of producing the paintings can be seen as a form of conditional design, where he as an artist restricts himself with a set of conditions on how to produce his work. By applying a layer of white paint, and then wait for half a day for the black layer to build up a whole canvas could be translated as a set of conditions.
Conditional Design
Conditional design is a way of designing work which focusses more on the process instead of the product. The way how the work is evolving or is being created has more importance than the medium. Proces, logic and input are three key aspects of the design. The proces is the product, logic is the tool and input is the material.
