The CONTEMPORARY van GOGH?
Meet painter Matthew Wong
YouTube and Medium: @LauriebFrankel
I want to share the work of contemporary painter Matthew Wong in the way I wish I’d first been introduced to him—strictly through his art, no back story.
Known for his masterful use of color and his preternatural feel for pattern in oil on canvas and gouache on paper, his captivating compositions often depict a small, solitary figure within a larger, imagined landscape. To quote Wong, “I may just pick a few colors at hand and squeeze them onto the surface, blindly making marks, but at a certain point I will inexplicably get a very fleeting glimpse of what the image I may finally arrive at will be, sort of like a hallucination…”
Upon first seeing Wong’s work, art critic Jerry Saltz wrote, “I saw a kind of visionary…something that seemed to be informed by a thousand sources…yet unlike most artists who…never quite escape those influences…I felt like I was seeing right through them to his own vision.”
Of the many artists Wong is compared to, a long list we’ll get to later, van Gogh comes up most often. Both took a while to find their calling which ultimately proved to be painting and both inventively used color and thick and expressive brushstrokes to express feeling and emotion.
Born in 1984 in Toronto, Wong, a Canadian artist of Chinese heritage, shuttled back and forth between Canada and Hong Kong during his formative years. A poet, writer, hip hop music and film lover Wong, after receiving his undergraduate degree in the states returned to work in Hong Kong and at age 26 enrolled in an MFA program in photography. Adopting the style of street photographers like Daido Moriyama, he started taking pictures without even looking through the viewfinder, interested in how the process made him feel. While interning at the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, upon seeing the work of [Julian] Schnabel and [Christopher] Wool he experienced a radical shift. “It hadn’t occurred to me that painting could take these forms beyond realistic depiction…and I had a newfound curiosity to read and find out more about the evolution of painting over the past century.”
With a near-photographic memory and racing intellect Wong, a self-described omnivore for sights, sounds, and ideas began voraciously educating himself through books and online in American, European and Chinese art across history and geography. By the time he completed his graduate degree he’d had already soured on photography finding it too mechanical and had begun experimentally drawing with ink. By 2013, at the age of 29, Wong began painting in earnest and in this early period was fascinated by the work of Bill Jensen, an American Abstract Expressionist, but later said, “The problem with Abstract Expressionism was that few people could tell whether it was good or bad.” He soon transitioned to figuration. “What I like about landscape is [it] accommodate[s] the widest possible range of painting and methodologies but also emotional experiences and realms of perception.”
While critics have compared Wong’s work to Matisse, Sérusier, Klimt, Redon and van Gogh as well as mid- and late-twentieth-century painters such as Katz, Hockney and Kusama, Wong’s own list includes Munch, Rousseau, Shitao, Xu Wei, Lee Lozano, van Gogh, Eleanor Ray, Brenda Goodman, Louise Bourgeois, Lois Dodd, and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to name a few.
Ambitious with a strong social media presence, just one year after starting to paint Wong had a solo show in Hong Kong. Within two years he was included in a group show in NY State, a year later he had his first institutional sale and in 2018 his first US solo show at the Karma Gallery in NYC.
Given that much of Wong’s work has an air of melancholy, as you may have imagined, this artist suffered. Chronically depressed from a young age and prone to anxiety attacks, he was diagnosed with Autism and Tourette’s syndrome. Bullied as a young child Wong told his mother, “I’m fighting with the Devil…every waking moment of my life.”
Wong made art at a relentless pace, sometimes painting up to 5 works a day, telling a friend, “Not painting is pain.” In 2019, at age 35, after completing more than 1,000 works in less than 7 years, he ended his life. Since his death demand for and value of Wong’s work has skyrocketed.
Knowing this artist committed suicide colors how one views the work, at least it did for me, and I wanted you to have the initial experience, however fleeting, of seeing this artist’s sublime creativity without bias or pity. While Wong’s painting can be viewed as the work of someone who struggled it is, first and foremost, amazing art.
Thanks for watching. Please share, subscribe and get your art fix on! Until next time.
YouTube and Medium: @LauriebFrankel