LATE CANADIAN ARTIST’S WORKS FETCH MILLIONS
Matthew Wong’s paintings vibrate with gleeful colour but with a close look, loneliness and despondence start distracting. Amid a riot of bold, stylized trees, for instance, a solitary figure, barely noticed, stands at a wishing well, his hands poised as if he has no coins.
That painting, The Realm Of Appearances, was on the auction block at Sotheby’s in New York last week and was expected to draw maybe US$70,000; instead 59 bidders from 16 countries clambered over each other for it. The hammer fell, sold, at US$1,820,000.
It was an astounding amount for a piece by a young, inexperienced, selftaught Edmonton painter.
A second piece by Wong, a whimsical watercolour, sold Thursday at Phillips, another New York auction house. It shot past its US$20,000 estimate to US$187,500. A third is being auctioned Thursday evening; and Mood Room, an oil on canvas bright as a St. John’s street, is on the block in Hong Kong next week.
This sudden, big-money embrace of Wong is a gleeful, vibrant backdrop but, like his paintings, there is distressing melancholy.
An October headline in the New York Times sums up the tragedy: “Matthew Wong, Painter on Cusp of Fame, Dies at 35.”
Wong was born in Toronto in 1984. When he was seven, he moved with his parents to Hong Kong. At the age of 15, the family returned to Canada, partly because of Wong’s medical issues.
His mother, Monita (Cheng) Wong, told the New York Times that Wong was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome and struggled with depression since his childhood.
After graduating high school, Wong attended the University of Michigan for anthropology, started taking photos, and went back to Hong Kong to study photography. It was during this stint in Hong Kong he started drawing.
“I began teaching myself to draw and paint from scratch since 2012, so it is still very early for me and I am just trying to see ‘what the paint does,’” he said in an online interview in 2013. He was sharing his output online.
“Facebook has been great as it has brought me out of isolation and put my images on public circulation for anyone to access,” he said in that interview.
Wong’s big break came in 2016 when some of his work was included by curator Matthew Higgs in an exhibition for Karma gallery in the Hamptons, the tony stretch of New York’s Long Island. Wong had a solo show at Karma a few years later.
New York fell in love with Wong. Or at least the wellto-do doyens of its art world did. Reviews were effusive.
“Some of the most irresistible paintings I’ve ever encountered,” wrote Roberta Smith in the Times. “My life had been improved and I know other people who have had the same reaction. Such relatively unalloyed pleasure is almost as essential as food.”
“When were you last wowed by a bowl of cherries?” asked The New Yorker of one of his watercolours. New York magazine’s critic said it was “one of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while.”
Some of the comparisons for Wong’s potential were stratospheric: Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Peter Doig.
Although only painting seriously for six years, museum galleries, major foundations and serious collectors were noticing and buying his paintings, whether with an eye for their emotional impact or expected collectibility, before his premature death.
All through the wild rise, Wong quietly suffered.
“He would just tell me, ‘You know, Mom, my mind, I’m fighting with the Devil every single day, every waking moment of my life,’” his mother, Monita (Cheng) Wong, told the Times after his death.
Wong died Oct. 2, 2019. The cause was suicide.
Before his death, the art world seemed bemused by Wong being a self-taught late-bloomer, who instead of art schools had degrees in anthropology and photography. After his death the amazement turned to his working through his troubled state. Suddenly, it’s from the astounding value of his work.
And, perhaps, for all three reasons together.