Beijing Commune this month.We finally wake up the beast – a two-year-old slobbering bulldog with two rows of firm grey teats. Niuniu has been snoring for an hour, like an idling chainsaw, in this 100sqm split-level studio near Dashanzi.

Guang Le

‘God, you stink,’ says her owner, the painter Wang Guangle. The artist is the dog’s polar opposite: while Niuniu possesses a neurotic tail and extrovert tongue, Wang is a picture of calm and reserve. Niuniu better get used to visitors.

Wang is in demand. Even as many of his artsy neighbours have packed up and gone home, he has gained a reputation among collectors as a steady, stable, serious artist. ‘I plan on staying,’ says Wang.

‘Painting is the only thing I can do.’ Wang’s small annual output – about ten full-sized paintings per year – has spiked his worth. Plus, he’s economical in that he doesn’t have a team of assistants helping to fill orders.

At 33, he’s a one-man show – and what he’s painting is as unique and morbid as he is, let’s say, grounded. While still a student at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, he worked like most of his classmates with figurative painting.

But by the time he graduated, he was painting the interior of his empty studio. A curtained window allowed only a sliver of light to enter, slicing across the studio floor.

‘That’s when I started focusing on the ground,’ says Wang. In 2002, Wang started his Terrazzo series, which, as the name suggests, focused on terrazzo – a common decorative material in Mao-era China, as it was in the former Soviet Union.

You’d see it on people’s apartment floors, and you can still see it on the floor of Beijing subway stations. ‘Some Western viewers see the Terrazzo paintings and immediately think abstract art. But gradually they realise that I’m painting a real object. I’m painting the floor.’

Abstract art is in the eye of the beholder. For Westerners, it works as abstract art. Chinese viewers connect to the painting because it makes them nostalgic for an era long gone – before parquet, angst and money-lust.

‘When I paint, I don’t think about anything else,’ says Wang. ‘I think about the canvas. This habit has extended beyond my workspace. When I walk down the street or have dinner, I focus on that moment.’

Some critics link Wang’s work to Zen, but he points to other sources – a Biblical reader, for instance, that a Christian gave him at art school. At first, he shelved the book, but gradually he’d read a little each day.

This meditative process led Wang to his most recent work. ‘Making the Terrazzo series,’ he says, ‘I’d paint several layers on each painting. The process reminded me of a custom back home in Fujian.’

Before cremation became Chinese law, the Fujianese in the north of the province would start painting their own coffin as soon as they felt their health was failing.

‘Each year they’d add another layer, until they died,’ says Wang, who saw this custom as a child, but buried it in his mind until his painting process revived the memory.

In the original folk tradition, people usually cover the entire coffin in evenly applied red lacquer, layer after layer, year after year, with the layers preventing the coffin from deteriorating.

Wang, however, chooses not to cover the canvas in red lacquer, and his patterns are different as well. It’s the process that he’s after. But rather than paint a layer each year, he averages about two layers per day. Not all the layers overlap, and are thinly applied so the final result is highly polished.

Often, Wang begins with an outside ring – a few millimetres in width – completely white. He then paints, ring after ring, into the centre, each ring getting darker. Sometimes he paints up to 60 rings on one canvas, a frightening prospect for would-be fakers.

When finished, the outside is white, like a halo. The centre is a solid, fleshy colour – often purple, pulsating with soul, the painter’s own.

Eerily, the artist is effectively painting his own coffin, which partly explains why the work resonates so strongly. It sells because – despite the unsettling source of inspiration – the painting is beautiful, both personal and distant.

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