MATTHEW WONG’S LASTING IMPRESSION

MATTHEW WONG: Magic at Work By Holly Haber “A Walk by the Sea,” 2019

The Dallas Museum of Art presents a retrospective of works by the late wunderkind

Matthew Wong was considered one of the most talented painters of his generation when he leaped to his death from the roof of his family’s home in Edmonton, Canada, in 2019.

He was 35.

Diagnosed with autism, depression, and Tourette’s syndrome, Wong was a self-taught artist whose work has been likened to Van Gogh’s.

Both artists had an uncanny ability to evoke emotion through the vivid hues they brushed onto canvas, and both suffered disorders that cast them as outsiders.

The Dallas Museum of Art was the first and only museum to buy Wong’s work during his lifetime, and now it’s first to mount a retrospective of his work.

“Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances” allows us to “delight in the magic that Matthew gave to us all through his art,” says DMA deputy director Tamara Wooten Forsyth.

This show of beautiful and striking canvases is on view through Feb. 19, and admission is free.

Vivian Li, the DMA’s contemporary art curator, says she worked closely with Wong’s mother and champion, Monita (Cheng) Wong, to create an exhibition “he would be proud of.”

She selected about 50 of his oil, ink, watercolor and gouache paintings from museums, private owners and the Matthew Wong Foundation and hung them chronologically in four galleries.

Wong’s career was only six years long, but he was a prolific artist who created a least a painting a day and constantly worked at improving.

“He saw poetry and paintings as bypassing the

limits of language,” Li points out. “I think the depth of poetry in his paintings is why they resonate so much with viewers.”

Each gallery contains selections from about a two-year span, so they unfold like a visual biography that reveals the evolution and increasing sophistication of his work.

The first room contains a number of ink paintings from his early career plus some abstract canvases that portend his strong instincts as a colorist. In 2014, he discovered Chinese landscape art at a public library and began experimenting with landscapes.

“He got interested in this genre and its capacity to hold different emotions and psychological terrain,” Li said. “It was a very accessible and open genre for him to explore.”

“Wong” means “king” in Chinese, and his painting of a birch forest and flowers features a small clearing with a tiny figure wearing a crown.

The crown doesn’t represent power, Li points out, but the monarch’s inevitable isolation from the world.

Like “The West” canvas that the DMA bought at the Dallas Art Fair in 2017, many of Wong’s color-saturated landscapes contain a small human figure.

“The theme was his trying to find his own place in the world,” Li explains. “He had a photographic memory and autism, and that might have played into how he saw the world.”

“The West” depicts a figure on a dark path that cuts through red earth, a couple of trees dotted with yellow leaves, and a broad night sky blanketed with stars. While he was at the Dallas Art Fair, Wong added more stars to the sky, so the canvas was still wet when DMA representatives brought it to the museum.

“He was a complete unknown, so he was very grateful to have this recognition,” Li says.

Born in Toronto, Wong spent his childhood in Hong Kong, high school years in Toronto, and undergrad schooling at the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology in 2007.

He returned to Hong Kong and worked a couple of dispiriting corporate jobs, neither of which lasted.

Feeling estranged, Wong began writing poetry and taking pictures, eventually earning an MFA in photography in 2012.

“In 2013, he started exploring ink because he felt that photography was a very mechanical expression,” Li explained. “Being self taught, he didn’t see any boundaries or hierarchies of the mediums.”

He worked feverishly, sometimes scraping paint onto the canvas, and sought advice and critiques from a network of artists and art world figures that he developed through Facebook and other social media, an education that Li dubs a “digital classroom.”

Wong returned to North America in 2016 and exhibited in a New York show by White Columns gallery, which has a long tradition of showcasing

Wong’s career was only six years long, but he was a prolific artist who created a least a painting a day and constantly worked at improving.

emerging artists. Called “Outside,” the show looked at outsider artists and the psychology of landscape.

Like the Impressionists, Wong’s approach to painting was that it had to be “of the moment,” Li says.

His landscape themes, pleasing and vivid palette, and use of pointillism and impasto techniques invoke Impressionism, post-Impressionism and often specific artists, including Klimt and Picasso.

Nonetheless, Wong’s work stands as a 21st century rumination on the journey of life, and, most importantly, beauty.

“See You on the Other Side,” 2019