Vienna,
Basically, life is hell everywhere, except the moments before a canvas. He was written by Matthew Wong, Chinese-Canadian artist who ended his in 2019, when he was only 35 years old, at a peak of his career, backed his painting by critics, collectors and high prices. Self -taught, in his brief six -year career he carried out above all vibrant landscapes, in which it is possible to be a psychological load, in oil, ink, watercolor and gouache.
Given its obvious connections with Van Gogh, which Wong himself pointed out (I see myself reflected in him. The impossibility of belonging to this world), It was almost inevitable for an exhibition to relate them: Albertina Vienneas has decided Act of painting as an escape for personal expression. Beyond its formal distance and the plastic concerns that motivated their respective works, this Austrian center wants to point out affinities between the two brief life authors: its deep sensitivity, a sincere attitude towards what creation implies, and some shared issues and motives, such as the queencia by the landscape and for the relationships between the interior and exterior spaces. Technical, both used thick brushstrokes that displaced in cross -linked, short and texture movements: their pieces stand out for their matric quality.
Wong suffered depression, autism and Tourette syndrome; It is known that the Dutchman fought with episodes of serious mental illnesses throughout his life: for the two the painting was a shelter and his melancholy manifested in natures of dark tones, sometimes counteracted by other living, according to a dynamic palette. The first yearned that his growing professional success positively influenced his health, but in the last years of his life he perceived that this hope was vain: he lived two years less than the thirty -seven that Van Gogh reached.
After residing a time in agitated rhythm cities, such as Hong Kong, Los Angeles and New York, the young Wong found a retreat in Edmonton, Canada, in 2016, where he could work in peace. Hurrying from these great centers allowed him to devote himself to his work without the distractions or obligations to navigate in the hypersocial world of the art market: his personal conflict between the desire to belong to him and the inability to do so influenced many of his creations, such as Old Town. Unlike Van Gogh, Wong’s landscapes are imaginary, executed in the solitude of his study; used the Portuguese term Saudade to designate their nostalgic yearning for places, people or things that no longer exist, or that have not yet arrived. Like paradise, the idyllic natural landscape is in its production a distant and desired place or a utopia that has no place in reality. And both for Wong and with probability for Van Gogh, art was a redoubt from which to extract strength and in which to verify the inaccessibility of such a place, generating feelings of loss.
In any case, the strong contrasts fit in their legacy. At the bottom of my project it may be a black and white ink painterMatthew Wong wrote. His works in these shades on rice paper refer to the direct influence that Chinese culture had in their work, which generally combines orient and western references. It was familiar, given its family origin, with both cultures and languages: China is such a hermetically closed culture (…). There are parts of me that cannot be completely escaped from those rootshe said. When he lived in Hong Kong, he painted ink at the beginning and end of each day, a ritual that structured his short career.
In the beginning he cultivated experimental photography, which he had studied in Hong Kong, while since 2015 he began to analyze the tradition of Chinese literary painting, which values subjectivity and representation of internal realities above the objectivity and expression of external appearances. He took Shitao (1642-1707) and Bada Shanren as teachers (1626-1705), who embodied an expressive -int-syrupitive approach in that traditional painting with ink. The use of specific brands to distinguish various pictorial areas is not only found, in fact, in Wong’s drawings, but also in Van Gogh: unlike Wong, he did not use the brush in those pieces, but a cane pen. And while Wong’s drawing style emphasizes the imaginary character of these worlds, Van Gogh’s works are based on direct observation.
On the other hand, oppositions play a central role in the respective works of Mathew Wong and Vincent Van Gogh: Light and dark, day and night, sun and moon, life and death. In reasons such as its snowy winter field with an abandoned plow and standing, Van Gogh combined the issue of changing stations with that of becoming and the end, turning that image into a metaphor of the course of life. Wong also took this matter, showing colorful summer fields in intense and radiant yellow tones or, as in The night watchmana lonely figure in a snowy winter landscape. In addition to the course of the year, the cycle of the hours of the day was also of interest to both artists: the famous representations of starry nights of Van Gogh are clearly reflected in the serene and emotional night paintings of Wong.
Although they evoke omens of death, the recurring motive of the stars in heaven also raises a feeling of trust and hope in a metaphysical life after the death that transcends the human world, in line with the historical interest of philosophers and artists for the sublime. Thematic oppositions have their formal translation: the use of complementary colors to generate tension and contradiction played an important role for both Wong and Van Gogh.
The artistic exploration of their own emotions and their inner world also connects both, which made introspection and self -reflection work methods as evident and fruitful as purely technical. The theme of the inner scene was constant in the two, especially in Wong: at the symbolic level, the look outside through the interior moves the ambivalent relationship of the introverted soul (of the artist) with the external world. The truth is that I do not feel comfortable with attention (…). I just want to be invisibleWong wrote.
If Van Gogh painted two interiors in Paris -his bedroom and the acquaintance Night coffee-, Wong recurrently represents abandoned spaces, addressing the subject of the individual retracted on himself. Instead of suggesting the security of a home, Wong’s stays talk about abandonment, melancholy and sadness. In his paintings, like Time after time either Night moodsview abroad through the window intensifies this emotion even more.
A section of the sample in Albertina focuses on the stylistic similarities that connect them: just like Van Gogh, Wong, who studied photography and cultural anthropology, was a self -taught painter and cartoonist, as we said. He acquired the ability to work in both media through the intensive study of works by eminent artistic referents, on the one hand, and through his own experimentation, on the other. Van Gogh’s compositions observed them mainly with the help of reproductions: he was not interested in imitating, but developing his own style through interaction with collective visual memory. Although Wong initially worked with an inspired style in abstract expressionism, since 2016 he developed his own language, which keeps analogies with that of Van Gogh: broad brushstrokes, dynamic prints and a dense plot of brands and shades that sometimes merge into intertwined ornamental patterns.
Matthew Wong: I think there is a loneliness or melancholy inherent in much of contemporary life, and in a broader plane, I feel that my work speaks of this quality.
Wong’s intuitive and imaginary landscapes range between abstraction and figuration, a vehicle for the expression of emotions being. He worked obsessively, producing up to five paintings a day at a dizzying pace in its beginnings: it was his way of carrying a diary. So prolific it was that he left around 1300 works.
The tour culminates with a section for its common nostalgia, which in addition to colors translated into solitary figures. In Wong’s work they appear as Leitmotiv, small figures in the surrounding space, especially in landscapes, fields and forests: they represent desolation, aspects that alluded to their own life. For him, however, melancholy is not an individual diagnosis, but a collective-social diagnosis, the attribute of a spirit of the time: I think there is a loneliness or melancholy inherent in much of contemporary life, and in a broader plane, I feel that my work speaks of this quality, in addition to being a reflection of my thoughts, fascinations and impulses.
In the last year before his death, Wong almost exclusively painted blue paintings, such as Road to the sea and Night crossing. In this blue series, he resumed that broader dialogue among artists of all time, that time with authors who had a special affinity for this color, such as Picasso, Yves Klein and Ad Reinhardt.
“Matthew Wong – Vincent Van Gogh. Painting as a last resort “
Albertina
Albertinaplatz, 1
Vienna
From February 14 to June 19, 2025
