Hannam, Seoul
Wang Guangle
Wang Guangle
Pace GalleryPace is pleased to present a focused exhibition of new work by Wang Guangle at its Seoul gallery. This presentation, titled Wang Guangle marks the artist’s first-ever solo show in Korea. In his upcoming show, 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 about the mundane. Inspired by a tradition from his hometown of Fujian, where elders annually lacquer their coffins in an act of contemplating of death, Wang’s Coffin Paint series examines themes of life and mortality, capturing memories and intuitive emotions compressed within his pigments. For these works, the artist repeatedly applies layers of paint onto his canvas, creating a textured and intricate surface with distinct lines and shades through this ritualistic repetition. 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 its creation. In paintings from the artist’s Untitled series, which he began in 2007, rectangular lines from the periphery of the canvas, creating an illusionistic portal within the composition. Each layer records traces of the actions of Wang’s hand and body to make his physical relationship to the canvas a central concern of the work as a whole, even in its 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. 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.