Fantasy coffin

They were shown for the first time to a wider Western public in the exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1989.

[2] Since then, coffins by Kane Kwei, his grandson Eric Adjetey Anang, Paa Joe, Daniel Mensah, Kudjoe Affutu, Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah, Benezate, and other artists have been displayed in international art museums and galleries around the world.

Ancestors are also considered much more powerful than the living and able to influence their relatives who are still alive, and the social status of the deceased depends in part on the use of an exclusive coffin during burial.

[citation needed] Among Christians, the use of custom coffins is relatively recent and began in the Greater Accra Region around 1950.

They were formerly used only by Ga chiefs and priests, but since around 1960, figurative coffins have become an integral part of the local funeral culture.

[5] The invention of figurative coffins was at one point attributed to Seth Kane Kwei, though the anthropologists Roberta Bonetti[6] and Regula Tschumi question this myth.

The idea of making and using custom coffins was inspired by the figurative palanquins in which the Ga chiefs were carried, and in which they were sometimes buried.

[7] According to some sources, Ataa Oko from La may have started making custom coffins and figurative palanquins around 1945.

In the interest of durability, items produced for museums are made from mahogany or another high-grade hardwood so as to guard against cracking and attacks by insects when transferred from one climate to another.

Each coffin takes two to six weeks to produce, depending on the complexity of the construction and the carpenter's level of experience.

Some models are painted by the head of the workshop, others by local sign writers, some of whom are well known in the Western art market for making hand-painted movie posters.

He later became specialized in the production of miniature coffins, a selection of which were shown in 2018 and 2019 at the Museum der Völker in Austria and in 2020 at the Kunsthalle Hamburg.

He was the subject of the Artdocs film Paa Joe and the Lion directed by Benjamin Wigley and produced by Anna Griffin, released in 2016.

In 2019, Kpakpo's work was shown in Ghana at the mobile museum of the Ghanaian curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim.

In 2010-11 he had his first one-man show in a Western art museum, in the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne.