Matthew Wong (1984-2019) was a self-taught Canadian painter whose surreal, poetic motifs garned critical acclaim art in just a few short years. The artist's iconic imagery often features lone figures wandering in dappled, imaginary landscapes, and moody, emotional interiors painted from memory. In his words, these images “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective.” Wong was hailed as “one of the most talented painters of his generation” by Roberta Smith.
Born in 1984 in Toronto, Wong earned a BA in 2007 in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in 2013 in photography from the School of Creative Media of the City University in Hong Kong. Wong's painting career spanned only six years, from 2014 to his untimely death in 2019. His work, however, broadly invokes art historical precedents that range from tenth century Chinese literati painting to the Western canon including artists like Chaim Soutine, Louise Bourgeois, and Yayoi Kusama.
The artist rose to international prominence in 2017 when he was featured in a number of group exhibitions in New York, including at Cheim & Read, where his work was reproduced in a review in The New York Times. Wong's first New York solo exhibition was in 2018, and was reviewed in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. In 2019, Wong died by suicide in Edmonton, Canada, where he lived. He was 35 and had struggled with Tourette’s syndrome, autism, and depression.
The first museum exhibition of Wong's work, Blue View, organized by Julian Cox, was presented alongside Picasso's Blue Period paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The first comprehensive retrospective of his work was presented at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2022, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2023. In 2024, the Van Gogh Museum staged a major exhibition pairing Wong’s paintings with those of Van Gogh, one of his greatest influences. The exhibition subsequently traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Albertina in Vienna.
Wong's paintings are represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
