Books Issue: Matthew Wong

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I close the book and look up.

A thin blue line is falling asleep on the horizon

As the breeze reaches the end of its lullaby.

                                    – Matthew Wong, The Shape of Silence, an excerpt from the catalogue Blue View

At twilight, there’s a fleeting moment when the world becomes indigo before transitioning into the grey shades of night. Matthew Wong, an internationally known artist who lived in Edmonton, captures this remarkable glow in the landscape paintings of his Blue Series. Along with horizons streaked with hues that linger long after sunset, the series includes interior scenes in which slits of light penetrate dark rooms. These soulful and hauntingly emotive works are featured in the catalogue Matthew Wong: Blue View, published in conjunction with his solo exhibition of the same name, on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario until April 18. It was the last series he would paint.

Wong’s life was filled with relocations: his Toronto childhood was followed by a move to Hong Kong and a return to Canada. Then it was on to the United States and Zhongshan, China, among other places. He received a degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA focused on photography from the City University of Hong Kong. But his painting skills were entirely self-taught. 

For his last three years, Wong lived in Edmonton, where he abandoned the colourful hues of his earlier works, and painted with a palette of blues. He spent his days in coffee shops and took long walks before working deep into the night. Solitude, one of the smaller of his immersive, nearly human-sized oils on canvas, was likely inspired by the North Saskatchewan River valley near his family home. The scene is enveloped in darkness. Only distant city lights glow, as if all life has moved indoors, leaving the valley deserted. And, as in many of Wong’s paintings, a concealed figure walks through this lonesome landscape.

Like these figures, Wong led a solitary life. Diagnosed with depression as a teenager, then Tourette’s syndrome and autism, he faced multiple barriers to forming in-person connections. But his online presence and keen correspondence with artists and curators cast a wide net. He began to garner international attention, including shows in New York, sales at major art fairs and rave reviews by prominent critics. His burgeoning career – which lasted less than a decade, but generated some thousand works – was cut tragically short by his suicide on Oct. 2, 2019. He was 35. 

The catalogue is a fitting tribute to an artist better known on the international stage than in his home country. Featuring his poem, The Shape of Silence, more than 60 paintings and essays by curators Julian Cox and Nancy Spector, as well as art historian Winnie Wong, it draws readers ever deeper into the artist’s extraordinary life and the sources of his inspiration. 

The introduction by Cox, the AGO’s chief curator, is particularly moving. He must have spent hours surrounded by Wong’s paintings and the result is tender, poetic prose that gives voice to the work’s quiet vulnerability. “A vacant chair, an open book, a curtain wafting in the nighttime breeze – all evoke a moment suspended in time, and add up to an overwhelming feeling of human presence in the face of its marked absence,” Cox writes.

Subsequent contributions draw ever wider circles and broader historical perspectives. Spector, an American curator whose past positions include the prestigious Guggenheim and Brooklyn museums, offers insight into how contemporary artists use the colour blue – influences that may have impacted Wong, who eagerly researched contemporary art online. 

Winnie Wong, an art history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, delves into the artist’s bicultural experience and sense of isolation. “Sometimes, home is the only place that will have us,” she says in her poignant conclusion. “And sometimes, home is just the place we no longer belong.”

Her words touch on an essential theme: finding a sense of belonging. It reverberates between the lines of the catalogue texts and in the solitary longing that saturates the work. “I do believe that there is an inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life,” Wong said in a 2018 interview. The legacy of his Blue Series is to make this private loneliness universal: each of us resonates, at least a little, with his art. ■  

Matthew Wong: Blue View, edited by Julian Cox. DelMonico Books / Art Gallery of Ontario, 2021. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Matthew Wong: Blue View at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from Aug. 13, 2021, to April 18, 2022.

Correction Dec. 6,  2021, 11:50 a.m. An earlier version of this article included three images – Solitude, First Snow and End of the Day – that the Art Gallery of Ontario provided without obtaining permission from the Matthew Wong Foundation. They have been removed.

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