How come that I had never heard of Mathew Wong and his paintings before? Maybe because he painted for a very short time, only a few years? Or maybe because he has never had an exhibition in Europe, either during his lifetime or after his suicide in 2019? It is only now that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is showing the first European monographic exhibition dedicated to this extraordinary artist.
The question rises, of course, why the Van Gogh Museum? The choice of location is not random, Van Gogh and Wong have a great deal in common, of which the latter was well aware.
Matthew Wong (1984-2019) was a Canadian with Chinese roots. Trained as a photographer, cultural anthropologist by academic background, he was a self taught painter. He also studied the history of European, American and Chinese art all on his own. Like Van Gogh, Wong struggled with mental health issues – he was autistic, diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and later with depression. Painting was supposed to help him with his emotions and give meaning and depth to his life. Hence the subtitle of the exhibition is Painting as a Last Resort. It is very possible that since the reasons for which Wong and Van Gogh started to paint were of similar nature, they both also liked the same colours – blues, yellows, greens, oranges. All intense, vivid and saturated. I think that it is down to these tints that the paintings which aroused from mental suffering, sometimes probably from despair, are nevertheless not gloomy and sad, but contemplative. Their brushwork is also similar. Wong liked to apply the paint thickly, with strong, long strokes or to create images with repeated dots and dashes. Here, too, one can see the similarity between the works of both painters. Matthew Wong, however, quickly developed his own style, gaining great recognition in the art world. Despite the many similarities and obvious inspirations, Van Gogh’s and Wong’s paintings cannot be mistaken.
This is probably where the similarities end. Van Gogh was happy to paint landscapes as well as portraits or still life and he always painted what he saw in real life. Wong, on the contrary, at first leaned towards abstraction, later his painting became figurative, but he painted almost exclusively landscapes or interiors. And not those which existed in reality, but those imagined or dreamt of. The repetition of certain motifs is very intriguing. In the landscapes you often see a road, often through a forest, and almost always you can see a small, solitary figure. Someone is always there.
In Wong’s interiors, on the other hand, there is no one inside, only a fragment of the landscape is visible through an open window. These paintings evoke a sensation of great silence and allude to a journey into oneself, into one’s own thoughts, emotions and dreams. Not necessarily memories, because these visions are very unreal. And very beautiful.
I must also mention the Museum’s excellent audio guide, which I highly recommend to anyone visiting the exhibition. The text, written in the form of a personal letter to the painter, begins with the words Dear Matthew… Then the author, a celebrated podcaster and theatre producer, Simon Heijmans, confesses to being about the same age as Wang at the point of his untimely death. He introduces visitors to the artist’s inner world and his struggles with mental health. I think I was most moved by the commentary to the painting End of the Day (2019, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in which a Portuguese, supposedly untranslatable word saudade, a motif of many of Wong’s works, is being evoked. It means homesickness only stronger, longing for people and places that disappeared or never existed. I don’t speak Portuguese and I hadn’t heard this word before, but standing there, in the Van Gogh Museum I realised that I knew this emotion, which comes to me more and more often with the passing of years. Having felt a strong relationship and a shared experience with the little figure at the bottom of the painting, I looked at all the other works in a completely different way. I didn’t just look at them, I experienced them. In this sense, the exhibition is almost therapeutic. The visual story of loneliness, melancholy and longing is soothing because it makes one realise that these emotions are part of the universal human experience.
Unlike Van Gogh, Matthew Wong was highly acclaimed as a painter while he was still alive. In 2019, The New York Times announced him one of the most talented painters of his generation. This recognition by both critics art lovers quickly translated into high prices for his works. In December 2020, his painting River at Dusk was sold for a record price of USD 4.86 million. I am sure that prices will only continue to rise as Matthew Wong will sadly not paint anything again.
