FALLEN STAR BURNS BRIGHT

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS THE FIRST MUSEUM RETROSPECTIVE OF THE LATE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST’S WORK.

BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL

Matthew Wong, See You On the Other Side, 2019, oil on canvas. Matthew Wong Foundation. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matthew Wong was a comet, briefly blazing through the art world firmament. This month, Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances will open at the Dallas Museum of Art. It is fitting that this is

Wong’s inaugural museum exhibition in the US. At the 2017

Dallas Art Fair, Karma presented his painting, The West, which was selected by the Dallas Art Fair Acquisition Fund for the

DMA. It was Wong’s first work to enter a museum collection. The details of Wong’s biography are well documented: Born in Toronto, he was raised in Canada and Hong Kong. After his family’s return to Canada in the late 1990s, he attended the

University of Michigan. In 2010, he enrolled in City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media, where, in 2012, he received a master of fine arts degree in photography. He lived in

Hong Kong and Guangdong Province until 2016, after which he settled in Edmonton, Alberta. In October 2019, Wong took his own life. He was 35 years old.

A completely self-taught painter, Wong drew inspiration from everything around him. In addition to poetry and music, he undertook an intensive study of art history and was particularly inspired by the art movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Contemporary artists such as David Hockney, Lois Dodd, Charline von Heyl, Yayoi Kusama, and Alex Katz, among many others, also served as inspirations. In Hong Kong, Wong came face-to-face with Chinese art and culture, where he particularly admired early Qing dynasty ink painting. Perhaps the scholarly Chinese tradition of writing poetry also inspired him to practice this literary art form.

By 2014 Wong had embraced landscape painting. According to the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, “He saw landscape as a wide genre for emotional and psychological explorations.” Sanctuary and River at Dusk are among the works from this early period that will be included in the exhibition of 45 paintings. Here, his riotous palette

Matthew Wong, Blue Rain, 2018. Collection of KAWS, promised gift of KAWS, inspired by Julia Chiang, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Matthew Wong, Banishment from the Garden, 2015, oil on canvas (left panel), oil on panel (right panel). Matthew Wong Foundation. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Matthew Wong, The Performance, 2017, ink on rice paper. Matthew Wong Foundation. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

explores tonal ranges, from the muted greens in Sanctuary to the ebullience of yellows in River at Dusk. “Sanctuary is monumental and very painterly,” Li says. With a lone figure nestled among the growth, it also presents a contemplative moment of quiet serenity.

While his work continued to progress, in Hong Kong he found the doors to critical recognition to be formidable. Fortuitously, when Wong returned to Canada in 2016, he found the door to social media to be wide open. It transformed his life and, in many ways, the art world.

With Facebook as the dominant platform at the time, he was able to connect with influential art critics. These connections led to unprecedented access to contemporary artists, many of whom became mentors and friends. He probed them with questions about materials and techniques while actively participating in discussions. “He was honestly curious and wanted to learn as fast as possible,” Li notes, adding, “Facebook was his classroom.”

By 2017, the art world had migrated to Instagram, where Wong regularly posted images of his work. Through this highly prolific period he found his own voice. “He was progressing every day, and people were giving him feedback. Everyone felt connected to him,” says Li. One of these new friends was the

Matthew Wong, The West, 2017, oil on canvas. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Fund, 2017.28. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Matthew Wong, The Realm of Appearances, 2018. Private collection. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Matthew Wong, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2018. Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Matthew Wong, Old Town, 2017, oil on canvas, 96 x 72 in. TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2017. Courtesy of the Matthew Wong Foundation; Green Family Art Foundation; Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris; and Karma, New York.

painter Scott Kahn, who felt a deep connection with the young artist. Initially seeing Wong’s work online, Kahn muses, “They were a curious combination of Asian traditional ink drawings and Western abstract expressionism.”

Wong’s use of space and his placement of figures on the canvas began to change by 2018. In some of these works, such as The Kingdom, Li suggests that the figure could be a self-portrait. “The Chinese character for Wong means king, and he often depicts a king (or else his regalia) in his paintings. It is usually a lonely, crowned figure, such as in the center of The Kingdom,” Li explains.

The change in physical environment, from the bustle of Asia to the calmness of Edmonton, marks another noticeable shift in Wong’s work. Li notes that this slower pace comes through in works such as Somewhere, which she describes as “a beautiful melancholy black-and-orange forest scene populated with figures and animals. If you look closely, [it] shows his brilliant sense of the emotional and psychological capacity of color.”

The exhibition also explores Wong’s reuse of canvases. Studies of these are being carried out by Laura Hartman, the DMA paintings conservator. “In some ways it was a practicality, in others it was a deliberate editing of his work,” notes Li.

Wong’s final series reflects a growing sense of social isolation. In The Realm of Appearances, the serenity of the night sky occupies the top quarter of the image while the frenetic forest pulsates below. One lone figure in the foreground seems lost amid the intense energy of dense foliage.

Painting provided Wong an avenue for wrestling his demons. Diagnosed early in life with autism and Tourette’s syndrome, he also constantly battled depression. And in spite of the universal admiration of those who knew him, this darkness, combined with the rapid rise to fame, became overwhelming. “It was almost a burden on him to have the world encroach on his world and his life,” says Kahn.

Since Li never had the chance to meet Wong, she had hoped that combing through his exuberant presence on social media would be illuminating. Instead she discovered that he had deleted everything. “He was very deliberate. He just wanted his art to speak for itself,” Li says.

And it does just that. “His paintings have hope. They are overwhelmed by beauty and the possibility of the world,” suggests Li.

“He made sense of the world through the act of painting, not just through its subject matter. He found doing painting to be very cathartic,” Kahn adds.

Li hopes that this exhibition will help demystify Matthew Wong, saying, “Many of his works speak to the universality of the human experience that he taps into over and over again.” Finally, she concludes, “I am happy that the DMA was part of the story early on.” P