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Lot Essay
In the spring of 2018, Karma Gallery in New York organized Matthew Wong’s first solo exhibition, and his debut received overwhelmingly positive recognition. Art critic Jerry Saltz praised the exhibition as “one of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while” (J. Saltz, “Losing Myself in the Paintings of Facebook-Educated Matthew Wong”, , April 19, 2018). The New Yorker magazine celebrated Wong’s works as “little rhapsodies of the everyday”(“Matthew Wong”, New Yorker, April 17, 2018). Specializing in landscape paintings and still lifes, Wong’s canvases are filled with romance, melancholy, and a sense of freedom that one often dreams of. Encouraging viewers to yearn for a different reality, Wong creates a world beyond the absurdity of everyday life.
Born in Toronto in 1984, Wong lived in Hong Kong with his family between the age of 7 to 15. In 2007, he graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology before returning to Hong Kong. Although he was professionally trained as a photographer, Wong’s passion was really in poetry, and he taught himself how to paint in 2014. Through social media, he was able to share his poetry and paintings with artists, critics, and collectors. Conversely, his exchanges with friends in the professional art circle also inspired him immensely. Being an avid reader, he was familiar with the catalogues of both Eastern and Western artists such as Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Shitao, Xu Wei, Vincent van Gogh, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd. From the works of these masters, he soon created new modes of representation and expression that came together as a unique artistic language of his own.
As an artist who was simultaneously involved in the disciplines of contemporary poetry and painting, Wong’s works are often infused with poetic nostalgia, melancholy, and a sense of purity. He often used a vibrant palette of contrasting colors and striking brushwork to bring out the dynamism in the subject matter. Figures and landscapes are reduced to simple color planes and lines that exude a sense of surrealism transcending the quotidian life. In 2016, Wong established his studio in rural Edmonton to concentrate on his artistic output. As he was closer to nature, his subsequent works became more focused on his earthly surroundings.
Completed in 2017, Homecoming appears as a portrait of Wong’s life after he settled into his hermetic existence in Edmonton, which is expressed in the painting as a the quiet countryside with a winding path that leads to a little house by the lake. A silhouette, standing in front of an open door, signals an ambiguity in the painting. The viewer is invited to concede whether this person is returning home or waiting for someone to return. Either way, there is an air of the Romantic sublime or the lone literati eccentric. Wong contrasts this with a lively small dog running down the winding path, thus coloring the painting with a tinge of gaiety.
Reviewing Wong’s oeuvre, one can see that the long winding roads are one of the artist’s favorite visual elements. Often starting at the bottom of the paintings they make their way deep into nature. In Homecoming, the road is undoubtedly the visual focus. Drawn with a few brushstrokes, it guides the viewer into a dream-like landscape. Up close, many surrealist elements can be found in the work. Located left of the path, the canopies of two trees are depicted as giant succulent leaves, and they are enveloped by a network of branches on the upper right corner. A great swath of green dominates the upper half of the painting, and it connects the tree in the foreground as well as the island behind the lake in the distant. This disjunction is skillfully constructed by interrupting the natural sense of space with a little pathway in the middle.
Paintings became the primary channel in which Wong communicated and reconciled with the his daily experiences of living with autism and depression. The artist frankly admitted that he relied only on his intuition when he painted. In fact, he never sketched or drafted a composition. He explored his inner conflicting world through the painting medium. Homecoming is executed with thick impasto with multiple layers of pigments that do not appear on the surface of the painting. Only when inspecting the painting’s edges, can viewers see glimpses of pink and purple hues, thus alluding to Wong’s artistic process of unleashing his emotions onto the canvas and laboring over the scene until the artist was satisfied.
In early October of 2019, Matthew Wong passed away at the age of 35. At such a young age, he gave the world visions of a nostalgia and purity in his paintings. Amongst the small number of works that he left behind, many were acquired into the permanent collections of Dallas Museum Of Art, Estée Lauder Foundation, other public institutions, as well as numerous international private collections. The invaluable artistic treasures that Wong offered us can be best summed up with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore from Stray Birds, “The world has kissed my soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs”.
Born in Toronto in 1984, Wong lived in Hong Kong with his family between the age of 7 to 15. In 2007, he graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology before returning to Hong Kong. Although he was professionally trained as a photographer, Wong’s passion was really in poetry, and he taught himself how to paint in 2014. Through social media, he was able to share his poetry and paintings with artists, critics, and collectors. Conversely, his exchanges with friends in the professional art circle also inspired him immensely. Being an avid reader, he was familiar with the catalogues of both Eastern and Western artists such as Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Shitao, Xu Wei, Vincent van Gogh, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd. From the works of these masters, he soon created new modes of representation and expression that came together as a unique artistic language of his own.
As an artist who was simultaneously involved in the disciplines of contemporary poetry and painting, Wong’s works are often infused with poetic nostalgia, melancholy, and a sense of purity. He often used a vibrant palette of contrasting colors and striking brushwork to bring out the dynamism in the subject matter. Figures and landscapes are reduced to simple color planes and lines that exude a sense of surrealism transcending the quotidian life. In 2016, Wong established his studio in rural Edmonton to concentrate on his artistic output. As he was closer to nature, his subsequent works became more focused on his earthly surroundings.
Completed in 2017, Homecoming appears as a portrait of Wong’s life after he settled into his hermetic existence in Edmonton, which is expressed in the painting as a the quiet countryside with a winding path that leads to a little house by the lake. A silhouette, standing in front of an open door, signals an ambiguity in the painting. The viewer is invited to concede whether this person is returning home or waiting for someone to return. Either way, there is an air of the Romantic sublime or the lone literati eccentric. Wong contrasts this with a lively small dog running down the winding path, thus coloring the painting with a tinge of gaiety.
Reviewing Wong’s oeuvre, one can see that the long winding roads are one of the artist’s favorite visual elements. Often starting at the bottom of the paintings they make their way deep into nature. In Homecoming, the road is undoubtedly the visual focus. Drawn with a few brushstrokes, it guides the viewer into a dream-like landscape. Up close, many surrealist elements can be found in the work. Located left of the path, the canopies of two trees are depicted as giant succulent leaves, and they are enveloped by a network of branches on the upper right corner. A great swath of green dominates the upper half of the painting, and it connects the tree in the foreground as well as the island behind the lake in the distant. This disjunction is skillfully constructed by interrupting the natural sense of space with a little pathway in the middle.
Paintings became the primary channel in which Wong communicated and reconciled with the his daily experiences of living with autism and depression. The artist frankly admitted that he relied only on his intuition when he painted. In fact, he never sketched or drafted a composition. He explored his inner conflicting world through the painting medium. Homecoming is executed with thick impasto with multiple layers of pigments that do not appear on the surface of the painting. Only when inspecting the painting’s edges, can viewers see glimpses of pink and purple hues, thus alluding to Wong’s artistic process of unleashing his emotions onto the canvas and laboring over the scene until the artist was satisfied.
In early October of 2019, Matthew Wong passed away at the age of 35. At such a young age, he gave the world visions of a nostalgia and purity in his paintings. Amongst the small number of works that he left behind, many were acquired into the permanent collections of Dallas Museum Of Art, Estée Lauder Foundation, other public institutions, as well as numerous international private collections. The invaluable artistic treasures that Wong offered us can be best summed up with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore from Stray Birds, “The world has kissed my soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs”.