Matthew Wong

Biography

In 2017 the Dallas Museum of Art bought a painting called “The West”. Its author was living in Edmonton at the time, had no formal art training and showed his work mostly online. The museum remained the only one to acquire his paintings during his lifetime.

Wong was born in Toronto on 8 March 1984. When he was seven his family moved to Hong Kong, and when he was fifteen they returned to Canada. He enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and in 2007 took a degree in cultural anthropology, then went back to Hong Kong the same year. In 2010 he entered the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong and in 2012 received a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography.

He had worked with photography since 2009 but did not believe in it as a profession. In a 2014 interview with Neoteric Magazine he said that by the end of his studies he felt he had gained neither real skills nor prospects. In 2012 he began to draw, and in 2014 he turned to landscapes. Ink drawings on rice paper were among his first works; watercolour, gouache and oil came later. The date when he began teaching himself to draw and paint (2011 or 2012) is given differently in different places, and I would not insist on either.

He learned from other people’s paintings, looking at Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Shitao and Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh’s influence is plain in the colour and in the thick, heavy brushwork. Wong squeezed paint from the tube onto the canvas or applied it with wads of paper. His landscapes often contain a path leading off into the unknown; they hold memories, dreams and feelings rather than particular places. Beginning with abstraction, he gradually arrived at a more representational language and felt close to both the Chinese and the Western traditions.

In 2016 he returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton. He posted his paintings on Facebook, and they were noticed by Matthew Higgs, curator and director of White Columns in New York. Galleries in New York and Hong Kong then began to show his work. His exhibition “Pulse of the Land” at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre had already taken place in 2015. In 2018 there were solo shows at Karma in New York and at galerie frank elbaz in Paris. The critic Jerry Saltz called the New York debut “one of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while.” Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The New York Times, judged Wong one of the most talented painters of his generation.

In Edmonton he worked in a studio whose existence the other residents did not know about, and over the years he painted and drew more than thirteen hundred works, sometimes five paintings a day. I would check that figure against other data.

Matthew Wong died on 2 October 2019 in Edmonton, aged 35. That year Karma opened the exhibition “Blue”, and the Massimo De Carlo gallery in Hong Kong held “Day by Night”. His works entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Dallas Museum of Art. Retrospectives were held by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (“The Realm of Appearances”, 2022 and 2023), and by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (“Blue View”, 2021); in 2024–2025 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Albertina in Vienna showed him alongside Van Gogh in the exhibition “Painting as a Last Resort”.