Matthew Wong achieved resounding critical acclaim during his short career, spanning just six years between 2013, when he began painting and drawing in earnest, and his death in 2019. In that time, he became known for vibrant, unpeopled landscape paintings in a wide range of styles and mediums, including oil, ink, watercolor, and gouache. In their universality, Wong’s landscapes reflect his own transnationality, having spent most of his life between Canada and Hong Kong.
The Dallas Museum of Art, the only museum that collected Wong's work during his lifetime, presents the first museum retrospective and U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the self-taught artist. Featuring approximately 60 paintings, the exhibition offers the first formal account of how Wong adeptly synthesized many inspirations—from the Fauvists to 17th-century Qing period ink painters, and contemporaries he admired—to create a visual language uniquely his own.
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Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. The Dallas Museum of Art is supported, in part, by the generosity of DMA Members and donors, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture.
Images: 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, The Long Way Home, 2015, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of Ontario, © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Art Gallery of Ontario; 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, 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