• Comment

Vanessa Graell

Updated Thursday, February 1, 2024-00:05

  • Van Gogh The Curse of the Ignored Genius

  • Artistic 'do it yourself' trend

  • Javier Calleja The Spaniard who is causing a sensation in Asia

As if it were a tragic prophecy, Matthew Wong (1984-2019) said of Vincent Van Gogh: «I see myself in him. The impossibility of belonging to this world. Shortly after, on October 2, he committed suicide in Edmonton, Canada.

He was 35 years old and suffered from Tourette syndrome, autism and depression.

Today, he would be the most sought-after young artist in the world, once again leading the ranking of creators born after the 80s, according to the latest report from the consulting firm Artprice. In April 2023, Sotheby's sold his two-meter painting

River at Dusk

(2018) in Hong Kong for $6.6 million, Wong's record to date. And throughout the year, with six other sales at auction, his works exceeded 14 million.

Although in Europe his name still does not sound much, in the United States and China a real fervor has already been unleashed for Wong's work, increased by the halo of a tortured artist and his premature death. While the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston celebrates a retrospective of its evocative landscapes, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is finalizing its first major European exhibition: a face to face between Wong and Van Gogh himself, under the suggestive title

Painting as a Last Resort

(Painting as a last resort) and that can be seen from March to September. "

Painting is a mysterious, often frustrating, but ultimately compulsive activity for me

," Wong wrote, although it could have been Van Gogh. According to the official theory - which several researchers have questioned in recent years - Van Gogh shot himself in the chest when he was 37 years old, leaving behind more than 800 paintings and 1,600 drawings. Equally prolific,

Wong has a thousand works

including gouaches, watercolors and paintings, many of which are large format.

Portrait of Matthew Wong.

"Wong began drawing and painting in 2011, at the age of 27," highlights Joost van der Hoeven, curator of the Amsterdam exhibition. «In just a few years she developed a very personal style, using intense colors to paint imaginative landscapes. Van Gogh was a great source of inspiration for him. His influence is unmistakable, in terms of the use of color, the densely applied brushwork and the personal themes in Wong's work. Despite the obvious aesthetic parallel with the Dutch painter (whom he pays homage to with titles such as his legendary

Starry Night

),

the legend of suicide has also become a powerful marketing tool

for auction houses. In 2020, just a year after his death, Christie's auctioned with a starting price of half a million dollars the painting

Shangri-La,

a colorful Eden, almost a

patchwork

of eastern mountains that it described as "Matthew Wong's masterpiece of 2017: a fascinating manifestation of his voracious study of masters such as Vincent van Gogh and Yayoi Kusama, who produce their most iconic works in hallucinatory states. The almost 2.5 meter piece was sold for 4.4 million. And the

Wong phenomenon began, with stratospheric prices that, far from balancing, do not stop rising.

There is a lot of Van Gogh in Wong. But also

Kusama

(there are her spots and iridescent dots),

Joan Mitchell

and the fury of her expressionist brushstroke,

Edvard Munch

and his disturbing undulations, the entire Fauvist troupe, the aesthetic elegance of

Henri Matisse,

the art brut of

Jean Dubuffet

or the refinement of

Xu Wei,

the great calligrapher and painter of the Ming Dynasty. Despite the intensity of the color, Wong's paintings always give off an atmosphere of melancholy and loneliness, even in his still lifes and in the settings with a lost, isolated character. "Matthew Wong was an artist with an intense drive: not only did he teach himself to paint, but he tirelessly studied the artists he admired, assimilating various elements of their work into his own," highlights

Vivian Li, curator of Dallas Art. Museum,

the only one to buy a work by Wong during his lifetime,

The West

(2017), when he was still a total unknown in the United States and had only exhibited a couple of times in China.

'A Walk by the Sea' (2019), a gouache by Wong.MATTHEW WONG FOUNDATION /ARS

The son of a wealthy Hong Kong family, Wong was born in Toronto in 1984 and later returned to China. His childhood was not easy: at the age of 13 he was already diagnosed with depression. His parents, Raymond and Monita Wong, returned to Canada when he was 15 to try to find better medical treatments, but then came the worst diagnosis: Tourette syndrome. Already at the University of Michigan, while studying Anthropology, he dealt with suicidal temptations and the family moved back to Hong Kong, to the exclusive Discovery Bay resort, on the island of Lantau, seeking tranquility for Wong. The young man wrote poetry, he admired both

Lorca

(he was fascinated by the idea of ​​the flamenco duende) and

Charles Baudelaire

or

William Carlos Williams

. After taking a master's degree in photography that did not convince him, he discovered painting. And he began to paint compulsively. Every morning, as soon as he got up, he would go to the terrace and paint a watercolor with Indian ink. The paintings began to accumulate in his studio, in a single day he could finish one work and start another, he even reused the canvases (Dallas' work,

The West,

is painted over a previous painting).

In the summer of 2014, he debuted his first exhibition,

Chapter One

, at the Cuiheng Art Museum in Zhongshan. Two years later he returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, near the industrial area of ​​the Saskatchewan River, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, which he usually depicted in a cold, gloomy blue. While painting in his studio, he liked to listen to hip hop:

Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye West

... But also the meditative jazz of John Coltrane. He claimed all of them as an influence, just like the films of

David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino or Andrei Tarkovsky.

He even titled the canvas

Unknown Pleasures

after a Joy Division album: a road that goes to a mountain but never reaches it. Today it is part of the collection of the MoMA in New York, as a donation from Wong's parents.

'See You On the Other Side' (2019), one of Wong's last paintings.MATTHEW WONG FOUNDATION /ARS

The trendy New York gallery Karma in the East Village was interested in his paintings and, after moving them through several fairs, organized his first solo exhibition in 2018. Wong's presentation aroused enthusiastic praise from critics and closed with several sales.

2019 was going to be his big year

, which began with the great exhibition

Day by Night

at the Massimo de Carlo gallery in Hong Kong and which would conclude in New York with

Blue

, another exhibition at Karma, immersed in a sad blue. and abysmal, which has been called Wong's

blue period

, a clear - although forced - parallelism with Picasso's blue period. Wong would not get to see the exhibition that opened on November 7.

On the fateful October 2, the Frieze fair, the most important in London, opened its doors with another of Wong's canvases:

See You on the Other Side

. That morning Wong received several messages with photos of his painting. And he painted the last of the watercolors of him in India ink.