Matthew Wong’s first museum retrospective cements the tragic artist's reputation as a master of melancholy style:
Matthew Wong’s First Museum Retrospective Cements the Tragic Artist’s Reputation as a Master of Melancholy StyleNovember 1, 2022
Just one of Matthew Wong’s paintings entered a museum collection during his too-short life. He’d sent his 2017 paintingto the Karma gallery booth at that year’s Dallas Art Fair. It depicts a white-clad figure sitting on a hillside next to a pair of tossed-aside flowers and gazing back, away from the foreground, toward a vast, flat terrain marked only by a pair of trees and a road leading inexorably into the distance—perhaps Wong’s movie-bred image of the Texas landscape.
In any case, when the Dallas Museum of Art’s curators visited the fair the next day, they must have been just as struck by this strange, fervent painting—somehow at once ecstatic and melancholy—as I remain today. The museum disposes of a fund specifically earmarked for purchases from the fair, and they used it to acquire this painting by an essentially unknown Canadian artist, whose solo shows to date, of very different work, had been in Hong Kong and Zhongshan, China.
Having taken an MFA in photography in 2012, he quickly grew dissatisfied with the camera, and began teaching himself drawing and painting. The earliest works in this exhibition—drawings from 2014, paintings from 2015—show the artist finding his way, experimenting with materials. But Wong was already set on the subject matter that would occupy him for the rest of his life: Landscape, and the very small part an individual human plays in the cosmos.
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