EGN NEWS DESK
“I see myself in him. The impossibility of belonging on this world.”
The artist Matthew Wong felt a deep kinship with Vincent van Gogh, and he expressed it with these phrases in a textual content message despatched to his gallerist in 2018. Though the 2 artists lived greater than a century aside, their lives have been uncannily related: They each grew to become artists of their late 20s, garnered reward as painters of landscapes and have been of their 30s once they died by suicide.
Mr. Wong, who was on the autism spectrum and had Tourette’s syndrome in addition to persistent melancholy, was 35 when he took his personal life in 2019.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is pairing the 2 artists within the exhibition “Matthew Wong, Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort” (which opens Friday and runs via Sept. 1). It’s a part of a brand new collection of contemporary-art exhibitions on the museum to “present that van Gogh’s work, in addition to his life story, concepts and letters, proceed to be related to artists working in our personal time,” Emilie Gordenker, the museum’s director, mentioned in an e-mail.
The exhibition is in no way a compare-and-contrast train between the 2 painters. There are solely six van Gogh works within the present — 5 work and a drawing — alongside 41 work and 21 works on paper by Mr. Wong.
“We’re not really inserting them subsequent to one another, or inserting them on a par with one another,” mentioned the exhibition’s curator, Joost van der Hoeven. “We’re welcoming Matthew Wong into the home of van Gogh.”
Mr. Wong — who was Canadian and of Chinese heritage — was born in Toronto in 1984. He relocated to Hong Kong together with his household when he was 7, however at 15 his household moved again to Toronto, the place he graduated from highschool.
After getting a bachelor’s diploma in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2007, he moved again to Hong Kong and took to writing poetry, which he shared with audiences at coffee retailers and poetry golf equipment round city.
It wasn’t till 2010 that his creative journey started in earnest. That 12 months, Mr. Wong enrolled in a pictures grasp’s program on the City University of Hong Kong. Yet by the point he graduated two years later, his focus had shifted to charcoal and ink drawing, and oil portray.
He started pouring ink on the pages of a sketchpad and becoming a member of up the pages to see what may occur. The ensuing works on paper have been coated with stains and blotches, but attractively composed. Mr. Wong realized there after which that portray was his true voice, the curators mentioned. He pursued it with drive and assurance.
“The stunning half for me was discovering out how assured he was with portray from the very starting,” mentioned Vivian Li, who curated Mr. Wong’s first museum retrospective on the Dallas Museum of Art in 2022 and 2023.
Ms. Li mentioned associates of Mr. Wong remembered his saying, “I will probably be an amazing painter” — not “in an egotistical method,” she defined, however in a sign that “he believed in his abilities.”
Mr. Wong’s first profession breakthrough got here remarkably quick: in 2015, after his solo present on the Hong Kong Visual Arts Center. Images of his work began circulating on-line and world wide.
The subsequent 12 months, when Mr. Wong relocated to North America — first to the United States, then to Edmonton, Alberta — he was a part of the group present “Outside” held on the Karma gallery’s non permanent area in Amagansett, N.Y. One of his work offered instantly, and fame and fortune ensued.
“He developed so shortly, and he soaked up every thing so shortly,” mentioned Mr. van der Hoeven. “Within seven or eight years, he mainly catapulted himself to the upper echelons of the American artwork world, which is very inconceivable. But it did occur.”
Along the way in which, utilizing the web and social media, Mr. Wong gave himself an artwork schooling. He studied masterpieces of Western and Chinese artwork on-line. He arrange a private Facebook community that included each well-known and lesser-known U.S. and Canadian painters, who grew to become his mentors.
In a phrase, “he used Facebook as a classroom,” Ms. Li mentioned.
Artists who related with Mr. Wong on-line have been requested such primary questions as “Can you combine acrylic with oil?” Ms. Li mentioned. He demonstrated such innocence and curiosity in his questions that, by the point he began displaying in North America, these artist associates he made on Facebook have been “championing him,” she mentioned.
A vital supply of inspiration — each private and creative — was van Gogh.
In a 2014 Facebook put up, Mr. Wong positioned one among his personal works subsequent to one among van Gogh’s, Mr. van der Hoeven mentioned. In a 2018 interview, he cited van Gogh as an influential forerunner. And three works painted in 2019, the 12 months of his demise — together with “Starry Night” and “The Space Between Trees” — have been open tributes to van Gogh.
“The Space Between Trees” is, the truth is, a duplicate of a piece by van Gogh that went lacking in World War II titled “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.” The lone determine on the middle has been changed by an Edmonton park bench on which Mr. Wong spent many a distressful second.
Like van Gogh’s chair, the bench “takes on the type of a symbolic self portrait,” Mr. van der Hoeven mentioned. “By inserting that bench into van Gogh’s portray, he mainly inserts himself into van Gogh’s work.”
Mr. Wong additionally started making connections with van Gogh’s life. Despite his sudden success — his 2018 solo present at Karma in Manhattan was a triumph, and his art-market costs soared — “he was left with the identical holes in his coronary heart that he had earlier than,” Mr. van der Hoeven mentioned. “It was at the moment that he discovered consolation in van Gogh’s story.”
Mr. Wong took to illustrating his struggles the way in which van Gogh did: in wildly expressive brushstrokes and a deep palette of colours. And a month earlier than his second solo exhibition at Karma, he took his personal life.
Though his profession was, like van Gogh’s, tragically minimize quick, “it did come to a conclusion, like an amazing arc, from the start to the top,” mentioned Ms. Li of the Dallas Museum of Art. “That in itself might be celebrated.”
