Matthew Wong

Over the course of his brief career, Matthew Wong was celebrated for his paintings evoking diverse historical references ranging from Chinese scroll painting to Van Gogh and Vuillard. His colorful, dappled vignettes of imaginary landscapes and half-remembered interiors have the uncanny ability to, in his words, “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective.”
This first museum publication features more than 60 of Wong’s deeply evocative blue paintings, of intimate interior scenes and luscious nocturnal landscapes, from his Blue Series made between 2017 and 2019.
Wong’s Blue Series paintings are notable for their saturated and richly varied blue palette and pervasive sense of melancholy, enhanced by solitary figures. The striking compositions reflect Wong’s technique of flattening the depth of space between the foreground and background with deft combinations of wet and dry brushwork. From monumental oils on canvas to smaller gouache and watercolor paintings, this body of work reveals Wong’s intimate and intense meditations on blue that is, as essayist Nancy Spector writes, “as much a mood as it is a color.”
With an introduction by Julian Cox, essays by Spector and Winnie Wong, and a chronology, this publication brings together scholarly voices to provide fresh insight and perspective on Wong’s work and his short-lived but exceptionally brilliant career.
Matthew Wong (1984–2019) was a self-taught Canadian artist, who held his first US solo exhibition at Karma in March 2018, garnering reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker, among others. His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

This volume compiles oil and gouaches by the self-taught Canadian painter Matthew Wong (1984–2019) developed for his 2019 solo exhibition Matthew Wong: Blue at Karma Gallery in New York. The dusky and nocturnal scenes were intended as the coda to a previous series of day-lit oil and gouache paintings. All share a watery treatment, awash in blue and its proximal colors. For this body of work, completed over the past year of his life, Wong concerned himself with the “blueness of blue”: its fluidity, its affect, and its uncanny ability to “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective.”

With the sensibility of a flaneur, Wong’s semi-fictional subject matter refers to the sights he witnessed on walks while traveling in Sicily with his mother during the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019. The fully illustrated catalog is introduced with a short story titled 1996–2001, 2020, n.d., by Brad Phillips.

This fully illustrated volume collects Matthew Wong’s small-scale postcard paintings made during the last year of his life in 2019. As Winnie Wong writes in her newly commissioned essay for the book, “Art critics have observed that Matthew Wong's landscapes are ‘uncannily familiar,’ and they do prompt viewers to search our own memories, but he almost never titled them as places. Instead, he consistently named them as moments in time: midnight, 5:00am, dawn, daybreak, 12:30am, Autumn, Winter, the first snow, the gloaming, the moon rise … For the postcard is a genre that seems to consciously elude a sense of stable locus, yet marks the times of our lives when we tried to grasp it. Matthew Wong painted at home, on the road, and in the studio. He spoke of the compulsion to finish each of his paintings in a single sitting, and talked of them always as process, rather than subject matter. Standing before paintings he finished years ago, he could recall every stroke and mark as if he had placed them just moments before.”

Matthew Wong (1984–2019) was a self-taught Canadian artist whose paintings evoke art historical precedents ranging Soutine and Van Gogh to abstract expressionism. His colorful, dappled vignettes of imaginary landscapes and half-remembered interiors have the uncanny ability to, 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. His work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas.

Published on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in New York, this book provides an overview of Hong Kong–based Canadian self-taught painter Matthew Wong’s (born 1984) drawings and paintings of lush, colorful invented landscapes in watercolor, gouache and oil.