DESCRIPTION

Known for his evocative, unpeopled landscape paintings in an incredibly wide range of styles, Matthew Wong achieved resounding critical acclaim in his short, more than six-year artistic career. Over his artistic journey—from 2013 until his death in 2019 at the age of 35—Wong left a remarkable oeuvre of over 1,000 paintings in ink, gouache, oil, and acrylic. The retrospective The Realm of Appearances surveys his brief yet intense development.

The sense of non-specificity and universality of place characteristic of his intimate landscapes reflects his own expansive worldview and transnational, bicultural life: born in Toronto in 1984 and growing up in Hong Kong and Toronto; attending college in the U.S. at the University of Michigan; and studying in Hong Kong and working in China before returning to Canada in 2016, where he settled in Edmonton.

Self-taught and operating outside the so-called centers of the art world, Wong had an intuitive ability to connect himself with other artists and creatives. This reflects in his diverse range of styles, which readily recall Post-Impressionists, Fauvists, 17th–century Qing period ink painters, and contemporaries he admired. Wong synthesized many artists and mediums to create a visual language uniquely his own.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Matthew Wong (b. 1984, Toronto, Canada; d. 2019, Edmonton, Canada) was a self-taught Canadian painter whose works invoke art historical precedents that range from ink wash literati painting, to the sweeping brushstrokes of Chaim Soutine and Vincent Van Gogh, to the intuitive mark-making of abstract expressionism. Working alternately in oils and watercolors, Wong’s compositions are known for their manipulation of planar space and striking contrasts between wet and dry brushwork. His colorful, dappled vignettes of imaginary landscapes and half-remembered interiors, in his words, “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective.” Wong held his first American solo exhibition at Karma in March 2018, garnering reviews in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. He received a degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in photography from the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media. 

His work is in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Esteé Lauder Collection, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario; and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Notable solo exhibitions include ARCH Athens, Greece (2020); Karma, New York (2019); Massimo de Carlo, Hong Kong (2019); Karma, New York (2018); and the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre (2015). Wong was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in August 2021.

See more Matthew Wong books

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Dallas, Texas, Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances, Dallas Museum of Art, October 16, 2022-February 19, 2023