‘Matthew Wong: Blue View’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, 13 August, 2021–18 April, 2022

The first non-commercial exhibition of the paintings of the late Hong Kong–Canadian artist Matthew Wong (b. 1984, Toronto–d. 2019, Edmonton), ‘Blue View’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), displays the most recent works made by Wong before his untimely death by suicide. A protean image maker, Matthew Wong painted inventively in oil and gouache, mobilizing a vast knowledge of Euro-American and East Asian painting that far surpassed the sources he noted in interviews (for example, Vogel, 2022). Wonderfully, the AGO exhibition, organized by the museum’s chief curator Julian Cox, presents Wong’s paintings without over-interpreting them: the catalogue text and didactic materials in the galleries are brief. These laconic statements permit Wong’s paintings, which reward close looking, distant views, and repeated encounters, to be seen for their considerable technical strengths.

To look at the works of Matthew Wong in person poses a paradox: while it is customary to view paintings firsthand, this practice diverges from the manner in which Wong shared his works during much of his career as an artist, when most were presented online. ‘Blue View’ thus provides an opportunity to reconcile the Internet images of Wong’s paintings with their visual and material presence. Some may find that Wong’s paintings in real life appear different from what is expected from the backlit online reproductions. This discrepancy of virtual and actual images illuminates how Wong’s painting practice was shaped by principally painting works intended for remediation by virtual replication: his technical handling of paint and art-historical knowledge manifest differently in the large-scale canvases that he favoured (some measuring nearly two metres on their longest side) and in his small gouaches (the largest ones being approximately forty centimetres on their longest side) than they do in standard pixel dimensions that may be further reduced by a computer or mobile-phone screen.

Simply by allowing museum-goers access to Wong’s paintings, ‘Blue View’ showcases one aspect of his painting in oil: his handling of the medium as though it were acrylic. For example, in Autumn Nocturne of 2018 (Fig. 1), as in many of Wong’s other oil paintings, the surface does not appear to be built up in layers, as oil paint is traditionally applied, with an underpainting followed by overpainted glazes. Instead, Wong appears to have applied oil paint in a single opaque layer, as is more commonly done with acrylic or gouache paints. In Autumn Nocturne, this is perhaps most clearly visible in the brilliant white of the full moon. Far from naïve, by handling oil paint in ways expected of acrylic or gouache, Matthew Wong makes a centuries-old medium seem fresh and unexpected.

Fig. 1 *Autumn Nocturne*
By Matthew Wong; 2018
Oil on canvas; 121.9 x 182.9 cm
© 2018 Matthew Wong Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York
Image courtesy of Karma, New York

‘Blue View’ also provides an opportunity for viewers to see how Wong’s practice of ink painting tempered his painting in oil, as the artist presumed the ink-like indelibility of each mark on its support. In Autumn Nocturne, this is visible in the blue tree branches painted over the full moon. Wong paints each branch only once, making no visible corrections or changes even though painting in oil permits such changes; this is true for the vast majority of his paintings in the exhibition. Wong primarily paints representational elements over a ground of dry paint, underscoring this sensibility. To the extent that the surface is built with layers, it is done so like an ink painting, one layer at a time with no further corrections or changes. When Wong uses a pointillist texture on a flat ground, his technique recalls the texture strokes (cunfa) of Chinese ink painting, which are often applied over areas already shaded with ink wash. Wong manifested his ink-painting sensibility in different ways in transferring Chinese brush-painting techniques to oil. In Autumn Nocturne, for example, the brown portions of the tree trunks silhouetted against the full moon, which are perhaps difficult to see in reproduction, appear to have been painted with a single brushstroke loaded with different colours, reminiscent of a technique of modern ink painting. Multiple works exhibited in ‘Blue View’ further reveal oil paint to be a medium for Chinese brush-handling techniques: Blue (2018) and Night 4, for example, overwhelmingly transpose an ink-painting sensibility to oil. Blue uses blue pigment on white ground to create a blue-and-white effect like Jingdezhen porcelains, full of lines painted with varying brush techniques and gestural patterns, yet is shot through with a yellow-brown pigment like the type sometimes used to enhance predominantly monochrome Chinese ink paintings.

Just as a painter trained in East Asian and Euro-American mediums might spend hours in ‘Blue View’ engaging and absorbing the idiosyncratic and brilliant ways in which Matthew Wong used these mediums, an art historian of equally broad interests will find the exhibition to be almost a test of their knowledge of canonical artists, especially modernists, of East and West. Premodern Chinese painters intentionally and creatively imitated (fang) the works of their predecessors, and Wong similarly links his Starry Night (Fig. 2) to the masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) and his lesser-known Starry Night over the Rhône (1888) (Fig. 3). Nevertheless, Wong’s Starry Night, notably its surface pattern, composition, and gouache-like appearance also strongly recall Huxian peasant painting. The S-curve composition of Starry Night reprises one used by the Huxian painter Li Fenglan (b. 1933) in her undated gouache Happily Starting to Thresh (Xi kai lian) (‘Huxian Farmers Paintings’).

Outside the scope of ‘Blue View’ are works that served as possible sources for Wong’s paintings, firsthand comparisons of the type so brilliantly offered by the adjacent Picasso exhibition. Without such curatorial intervention, viewers may not conjure such sources in their heads and thus may not understand the rich art-historical context of Wong’s paintings. Beyond Starry Night, several of Wong’s exhibited works might best be contextualized by Japanese modernist paintings, which are not well-known outside Japan. For example, Unknown Pleasures, 2019 (Fig. 4), which features a conical, snow-capped mountain, might benefit from hanging alongside one of the Fauve-inspired paintings of Mount Fuji by Ryūzaburō Umehara (1888–1986) or lesser-known prints from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) that similarly represent the sky as the upper margin of the painting.

Fig. 4 *Unknown Pleasures*
By Matthew Wong; 2019
Oil on canvas; 165.1 x 165.1 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York
© 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOCAN, Montreal
Image courtesy of MoMA/Art Resource, New York

‘Blue View’ is an essential first step in reconceptualizing the work of Matthew Wong for the public museum. However, the exhibition and catalogue are similar to those of a commercial gallery and are thus unable to showcase the tour de force of art-historical knowledge embodied in Wong’s pictorial and technical citations. The relationship of Wong’s works to artists like van Gogh and Matisse is self-evident (Russeth, 2019). One wonders, however, if the appropriation of the Fauvist idioms in Chinese painting by the Hong Kong painter Ding Yanyong (1902–78), who studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where Umehara taught, might be an avenue of further exploration. Furthermore, while Edmonton is not well-known as an artistic centre, in the early 1990s the influential New York-based art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–94) believed its painting to be among the strongest in the world (Bingham, 1991). One thus wonders what Matthew Wong may have been looking at in Edmonton collections of modernist painting.

Fig. 5 *Untitled*
By Matthew Wong; 2019
Gouache on paper; 22.9 x 30.5 cm
© 2019 Matthew Wong Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York
Image courtesy of Karma, New York

This show affirms the need for future scholarly exhibitions that advance the understanding of Matthew Wong’s painting by revealing the complexity of its global and enduring art-historical relationships. Wong’s paintings beg to be displayed in a more complex format than a solo exhibition. For example, one might better understand Wong’s Morning Mist (2019) alongside a blurry landscape by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). One minimalist blue gouache landscape with a brilliant orange horizon, Untitled (2019), is so chromatically and compositionally similar to Home with a Complete Electronic Security System (1982) by Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) that it is hard to imagine Wong not knowing the Ruscha work. With Wong’s gouache depicting icebergs, Untitled (2019) (Fig. 5), installed only a few galleries away from the AGO’s sublime Lawren Harris (1885–1970) snowscapes and other Group of Seven landscapes, ‘Blue View’ hints at the kind of future exhibition context that Matthew Wong’s paintings both demand and deserve.

Jennifer Purtle is Associate Professor of Chinese and East Asian Art History, Department of Art History and PhD Coordinator, Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

This article first featured in our March/ April 2022 print issue. To read more, purchase the full issue here.

To read more of our online content, return to our Home page.

‘Matthew Wong: Blue View’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, 13 August, 2021–18 April, 2022

Sir Joseph Hotung (1930–2021)

An Interview with Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang