Highlights
‘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.