Selected Writings by Matthew Wong

Li, Vivian

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Selected Writings by Matthew Wong

Vivian Li (Editor)

Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances

Painting was just one form of expression that fascinated Matthew Wong. A poet, photographer, and art critic before becoming a painter, Wong regularly attended poetry clubs and contributed to art and literary journals in the late 2000s and the early 2010s when he lived in Hong Kong. Alongside his painting practice, Wong enthusiastically shared his ideas through...

Author

Vivian Li (Editor)

PublisherDallas Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100098

Selected Writings by Matthew Wong

Painting was just one form of expression that fascinated Matthew Wong. A poet, photographer, and art critic before becoming a painter, Wong regularly attended poetry clubs and contributed to art and literary journals in the late 2000s and the early 2010s when he lived in Hong Kong. Alongside his painting practice, Wong enthusiastically shared his ideas through poetry and writing, primarily online and with friends. The following selections from Wong’s prolific body of writings, including early published exhibition reviews and one of his first interviews from 2012 as he was embarking on his painting career, offer a unique and intimate window into how he saw himself as an artmaker, as well as his open admiration and indebtedness to other art forms and creatives.

POETRY

“Four People”

1.

I look up at the sky and see more beauty

Jumping out of the windows of clouds

Than I could hope to catch

As my younger self.

2.

Two lonely roads are touching heads

In a desolate forest. A mile

To the east, a voluptuous stream.

And sitting in a tree, the man dressed

As a bat was wondering where on earth

He could find the best silence.

3.

Late in life the magician acquired a dream

That visits him several times a year:

He is eating at a Chinese restaurant

In a nameless American city somewhere

In the Midwest, and at the end of the meal

He cracks open his fortune cookie

And every time it says the same thing:

“Has your work come to nothing?

No, it has come to this.”

Aug 3, 2015, 10:36 AM

* * *

“Yesterday”

Yesterday was a desert all over again.

I Left my footprints on her unblemished

Curves, both the black parts,

And the nearly white.

I did not feel thirsty for a second.

It was hot, but not unbearable.

When I felt like kissing the ground,

That is exactly what I did.

I made strange faces, sang songs

I heard my mother sing during

The childhood l never had, and if

I got really excited, I screamed

A bottomless scream that was without

Angst or malice. I could not remember

Whether it was dark or light the moment

I finally went to sleep, but here we are,

And hello, sunshine.

Nov 24, 2013, 10:03 AM

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

My way of practicing photography goes against the conceptual-minded and heavily staged or digitally manipulated tendencies that have come to dominate most of contemporary art photographic discourse. Typically operating in the manner of Baudelaire’s flaneur, I go about much of daily life simply walking, sometimes with a purpose (i.e., going from one practical destination to another and in the middle taking a picture if I come across one), but mostly not. Working in this mode, without a preconceived idea of what image I will end up with, or [without] even looking for anything in particular when I head out the door, camera always on hand, I then let bodies of images develop organically and intuitively, in which case the entirety of a worldview or particular way of seeing only comes into focus after an extended period of work, from which motifs and themes will emerge from the subconscious. My photography is as much about the act of seeing itself as it is [about] the subject matter in the images. As for the latter, what comes across most evidently is a sense of closeness to the streets in a way that is at once unsentimental but elaborate, circling around ideas of desire, death, and the existential solitude of the photographer forever penetrating into moments at once private yet not wholly unfamiliar. I take a picture of something because I see myself in it.

Email from Matthew Wong to Dena Rash Guzman, June 26, 2012

ON PAINTING

My work is essentially an inquiry into the process of painting as a vehicle to explore and develop a personal symbolism which emphasizes humanism. The paintings often employ archetypal figures against a backdrop of the natural world, and as they are not preconceived in advance but worked out over time on the surface, the process of markmaking tends to highlight paint’s abstract reality. The painterly vocabulary I strive to develop simultaneously emerges from my inner life but hopefully takes on a universal dimension which reflects issues relevant to my processing of the present moment.

Email from Matthew Wong to Matthew Higgs, June 21, 2016

REVIEWS AND CRITICISM

Ben Quilty: Straight White Male
Pearl Lam Galleries, 6/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, January 15–March 1, 2015

Boy, you’ll be a man soon.

Those words, an alternate take on Neil Diamond’s famous lyric (“Girl, you’ll be a woman soon”), float through my head as I encounter the printed title “Straight White Male,” the first exhibition of Australian artist Ben Quilty at Pearl Lam Galleries.

What does the Straight White Male look like, and what does he do? I look through the paintings for clues, and in the large white space—empty save for this reviewer and the works—I find myself posing more and more questions to the artist. Is the archetypal Straight White Male possibly your Dad, staring into the melancholy distance where the boy he is talking to was once himself? Time flies. The next minute, Dad shows up with peacock hair in a painting, asking for your approval of his new style (“Dad with Peacock Hair,” 2013). Or was that something you dreamed up while dozing off under the scorched Afghanistan sky while stationed there as a war artist? And the rug you slept on; Dad was there, too, watching beneath you with four heads (“Painting For a Rug About My Dad,” 2014). Rest well, my son. Dad is there no matter where you go, which may be what it means to be a man . . .

Does war do an effective job of separating the boys from the men? You could ask Private Phil Butler over there. He spent 12 months in Nui Dat during the Vietnam War in 1970. His eyes tell you what he has seen, what he has lost. The horror, the horror. You paint his portrait a second time, his lips sealed, a metal handle coming out of the left side of his face (“Straight White Male [Phil],” 2014), a mug that contains the pain and love men serve up for each other again and again and again.

You look into the mirror late one afternoon and find that your head is falling off your neck, hanging at an impossible angle. The sight reminds you, perhaps, of another painter who has probed the nature of hurt—Francis Bacon. But you are still yourself, and the bruises on your arms and torso washed with turpentine (which you handled with your own brush just a minute ago) attest to this.

You make your way out to the southern highlands of New South Wales and see hordes of tourists snapping selfies by the Fairy Bower Falls. It is a pretty sight—perhaps too pretty. As you yourself have known, the task of painting a land one calls home can result in a Rorschach blot smeared with so much flesh and violets and crimson jewels (“Homeland,” 2014); the beauty becomes suffocating, and we lose sight of the gravity of being human. You know that those phones and cameras whose shutters go off incessantly on that spot will not register the smiles of the aboriginal people who were massacred there in the 19th Century. You decide to make your own image of the location in a way that feels more true, which is to paint a panoramic depiction of the land, violently pressing paint-filled canvas against paint-filled canvas, like water crashing down relentlessly on rocks and when you are done, no humans are present in the picture, but all of them are accounted for (“Fairy Bower Rorschach,” 2012).

No man is an island, as the saying goes. But what becomes of a photojournalist who makes his way out to an island on the Pacific Ocean that could have been a picturesque Utopia, only to find that the sky was carved with a painter’s spatula into an ominous shade of burnt umber, blacker than black, and that the flowers of the ground were trampled by boots that leave tell-tale vermillion streaks (“The Photojournalist (AQ),” 2014)? Will he get lost in strange territory, find himself proud to become equally as savage as the landscape and never leave? There is no easy answer, and you don’t pretend to know even as you keep asking the world. The sea remains blue, and green, and white. In the midst of all this, does God exist? Quilty’s paintings give me the sense that Man does. That may be enough, for now.

Published in Ran Dian, February 4, 2015. Courtesy of Ran Dian

The Poet, Painter and Novelist—Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan
White Cube, 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong, June 4–August 29, 2015

There is an infinitesimally fine line between poetry and painting; at their best, both seek to bypass the logic of language to enter a realm where sensations and associations can be vividly perceived, but not spoken into the air—human consciousness perfectly distilled to an irreducible essence. The poet, painter and novelist Etel Adnan, who is now in her ninetieth year,1Editor’s note: Etel Adnan died in November 2021. has in recent years been celebrated for her intimately scaled yet chromatically complex oil paintings at events such as documenta 13 in 2012 and last year’s Whitney Biennial, along with a steady stream of gallery exhibitions across the globe. However, Adnan’s arrival in the art world is not a story of unexpected or overnight success. Her semi-abstract paintings of suggested landscapes and architectural vistas, so evocatively charged with their finely calibrated nuances of place and time of day, are aesthetic extensions of a sensibility which has endlessly captured in poetry and prose the existential nature of exile—both geographical and political.

Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek Orthodox mother and Syrian Muslim father, from early youth Adnan experienced a peripatetic movement of speech and thought; she was educated in French at school, and spoke Greek and Arabic at home. Adnan composed her first poems when she was 20, which she says were about the sun and the sea. Throughout her adult life, she would move restlessly across the world, from Beirut to France and California, her writings and travels arising as a response to circumstantial factors, and often directly tied to political unrest. Adnan’s journey as a painter began in 1960, while she was teaching philosophy at a California college. Unhappy with the French treatment of colonized Arab populations, she renounced writing in the French language and declared that she was “painting in Arabic”. . . .

This brings us to the present moment, as we move about the two floors of White Cube’s Hong Kong space, we take in over twenty of Adnan’s paintings, which represent her first solo exhibition in the region. The most immediate impression is that of a quietly assured display of work; despite the modest scale of the paintings, the largest work measuring roughly 16 × 13 inches (all paintings are untitled and completed in 2014–2015), one never senses that the canvases are being dwarfed by the immaculate white walls and high ceilings of the gallery. The paintings are not installed with any sense of a narrative progression, but rather are hung as elliptical glimpses of settings that feel like landscapes or quiet urban corners revisited many times in the eye of both body and mind; no place is ever the same at two separate points in time. The colors, too, undiluted as if squeezed straight out of a tube and spread evenly on the surface with a palette knife, remarkably never seem to repeat themselves.

At a glance, one might detect a mountain range punctuated by water here, the setting or rising sun emerging from the surface of another canvas, or a cluster of clay houses captured at a moment in the afternoon when the blue sky which hangs above them is just so. Slowing down to look again, we notice that paradox and uncertainty begin to settle in: what is that brown dot looming directly over the sun? Is that blue block in the upper left corner the sky, or someone’s balcony? A vertical green rectangle in the sky—signifies what, if not just paint? The longer one looks, the more hesitant one becomes to name the object of looking, and all that one is left with is the act of looking itself—an act which is as necessary as reaching for the nature of the ground one is standing on. Recalling Adnan’s nomadic existence and winding odyssey as a writer whose work is inextricably linked with issues of gender, nationality and injustice, one is reminded by her paintings that looking is never a passive act. It is always a political one, in its inexorable movement towards confirming a perceptive truth that ultimately may not be found, but must be searched for and grappled with. As the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho once wrote in his poem, “The Narrow Road to the Interior”: “every day is a journey, and the journey itself home.”

Published in Ran Dian, July 24, 2015. Courtesy of Ran Dian

MY MONOMANIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW WONG, HONG KONG ARTIST

Note: My Monomania is a new recurring feature in which I showcase artists or writers with whom I am most recently and/or viciously fixated.

—DRG [Dena Rash Guzman]

~

Description: Untitled photograph (Hong Kong) by Wong, Matthew

Untitled photograph by Matthew Wong, Hong Kong, 2012. Matthew Wong Foundation.

Matthew Wong is a photographer and painter living in Hong Kong. He works in charcoal and with cameras. He most often takes photos of public scenes in Hong Kong. His studio is the subway, the street, the office and even his hairdresser’s shampoo bowl. His relationship to his subjects is unflinchingly intimate.

In Wong’s photography exists an apparent reverence for his subjects, and some of the shots I’ve seen are so bold as to appear dangerous to capture. Some convey the joy of living in one of the world’s most populous cities, and some the abject despair. Some are cold and detached, as though Wong is the city’s therapist, or a cruel ex-lover. Some are so warm and tender as to show a nearly maternal affection for Hong Kong and the people in it.

All show that Wong is intrinsically aware of his surroundings. When I look at his work, I can’t tell if he’s the hunter or the hunted. His ability to still and capture the movement of humanity is evident no matter the age of his subjects, what they are doing, or where they are going. Some of his photos focus on inanimate objects, and often even these things seem to be alive in his work. They might be coming at him. If they are, he’s ready, camera in hand, to record what he saw. Matthew, who currently shoots with a digital camera, does not rely on post-production. When asked about processing his work, he said that he does not even crop the images. He does not own Photoshop, and has never used it.

I’ve had the pleasure of multiple correspondences with Wong, who is in possession of a deadly and dry sense of humor. During a recent talk about publicity, he told me he’d already decided to never give an interview in his whole life, unless it was with a journalist he had great respect for. Later, when I asked him if I could publish an imaginary interview with him, he said no, because he was willing to grant me an interview on the spot. I was flattered until I remembered I am not a journalist at all. I am a poet. These are my five questions for Matthew Wong.

Dena Rash Guzman Your images haunt me. I never thought I would actually say that to anyone. It’s a cliche, but they follow me around the farm where I live and on into Portland. I have been to China, but not Hong Kong. There is something about it that I found to be so unlike the United States: people living their private lives so very publicly. Not only that, they look at each other while they are doing it. On my first visit to China, I noticed some Chinese looking at me when I made a social error, and was told, “Chinese people love to look.” The first time I saw a woman washing vegetables with the spigot outside her apartment building, I had to take a photograph. I had never seen anyone wash onions in public before. She might as well have been shaving her armpits. I felt kind of bad, because her back was to me, and I objectified her in a way. That photo was later published. She never knew, I am sure. I feel a kinship to your subjects in your work, and a sense of respect, such as in the image of the sleeping workers or homeless people outside an apartment building. You got down to street level to take that photo. You must have at least been kneeling. When you take these intimate photos of perfect strangers, do you ever feel like a voyeur or an opportunist?

~

Untitled photograph by Matthew Wong, Hong Kong, 2012. Matthew Wong Foundation.

Matthew Wong Not at all. I realize there is both voyeurism and a selfish opportunism involved in what I do; I’ve never questioned the ambiguous morality of it all. The other day an old high school classmate I hadn’t ever really talked to or seen in over a decade came out and said what I was doing was invasive and sick. But I don’t see it that way—I’m just doing what has to be done in the moment, which is to make an image I can live with.

For me, to take photographs is a way of confirming that I exist, which is something I question all the time. When I can make an image I’m satisfied with, then that question goes away for a little while. As for the closeness to the subjects you often see in these images, many of them relate to something primal like desire or solitude. But at the same time I don’t think I could do a good job of shooting somebody on a formally commissioned assignment. It’s about that instantaneous brush of contact with somebody you’re just walking by on the street, which for me is crystallized through the photo. But I don’t spend much time looking at the images afterwards, it’s really about existing very intensely in the present. I think that’s where my photography deviates from the traditional idea of it, as a tool of memory and to hold on to the past. It’s the clicking of the shutter that means everything for me. But I wouldn’t really say I’m a photographer either in the strict sense, as I have no interest in the specificity of the medium or its functions. The medium is unimportant; this just happens to be the most immediate way for me to have a dialogue with myself and my surroundings.

~

Untitled photograph by Matthew Wong, Hong Kong, 2012. Matthew Wong Foundation.

DRG Were you born in Hong Kong? If not, how long have you lived in Hong Kong?

MW I was not born in Hong Kong; I was born in Toronto, Canada. But I spent the formative part of my childhood years here and I came back for good after graduating college at Michigan. I was never really creative or interested in art as a kid, though. It was really the past two years and some change I picked up the habit and started to engage with it seriously.

DRG How do you actually take the photos? With a camera or a phone? Do your subjects ever realize you are taking the photos? Do you ever snap what you think will be a photograph and accidentally capture something else entirely?

MW I take my photos mostly with a DSLR, a Canon. I used to shoot with a Contax G2 35mm rangefinder as well but lately I’ve just been shooting digital as there are no developing costs and the image is sharper. Sometimes the subjects might get an awareness a photo is being taken, but whenever I’m shooting people I don’t look through the viewfinder; I adjust all the settings ahead of time and just walk by and take a photo. The entire transaction is so fast, and because I keep walking, they don’t really know what hit them, so to speak.

DRG How long have you been doing this? Were you influenced by upskirt smut?

~

Untitled photograph by Matthew Wong, Hong Kong, 2012. Matthew Wong Foundation.

MW I’ve been photographing seriously for about two and a half years now, but I’d say it wasn’t until this year I’ve reached a more personal point of view and confidence in my art. I don’t know if it would qualify as artistic maturity yet, but at least when I’m out and about every day I have a pretty good grasp of what I want out of an image at this point, and when something doesn’t work.

I don’t think upskirt smut for its own sake is very interesting. Sexuality is something I think about a lot in relation to my own work, and of course there are many elements of my practice that descend literally from the street walker/voyeur tradition of masters such as Daido Moriyama, whose work I like. But mainly I’m interested in the formal conditions of an image; for me that’s the test whether something holds as art or not. Photos I’ve taken which can be seen as veering dangerously close to pervert territory, [but] there is always something about the images in terms of line, color, composition and light that were my primary reasons for making the image in the first place. I know that may sound pretentious, but truth be told I don’t even get aroused looking at these images or even the moment I take them. If I really wanted to get off, there are much easier and more satisfying ways to do that.

But at the same time, in most of my work, what’s at stake is my coming to terms with some private notion of what qualifies as beauty. Sometimes this beauty is compromised by a tension arising from the moral aspect of it, such as in a voyeuristic photo of a woman on the street. Which itself may be further contradicted and complicated by seemingly arbitrary companions such as cloud studies, or a still life, or my images of animals. When considering my work, I don’t think you can get much understanding from isolating a single portion of it, they need to be considered all at once as I think this kind of complex worldview that arises from a versatile and almost at times arbitrary sequence of images, containing truths and fictions that sometimes are in harmony, but also often clash, is what is interesting for me. For the longest time, my girlfriend said what I was doing in photography was stripping the subjects and picture plane of any possible beauty, but I still disagree with her. Beauty is a primary concern of mine, and I think it always will be.

DRG Your photographs of the clouds and sky are entirely different, and remind me of your paintings, which as far as I know are primarily charcoal. Where your photos have such starkness and clarity, your paintings are dreamlike. Which do you prefer, painting or photography?

MW Which leads into my recently begun practice of drawing and painting, something that is still very new for me as I’ve never been good at drawing; actually I can’t draw at all—if you told me to draw an apple or your face, what would result would likely be a disaster. But that is also precisely why I do it, because I feel a need to challenge and overcome this idea of doubt or helplessness that often comes up when thinking about the creative process.

Even though there may seem to be a disconnect between my photography and drawing/painting, I think they are getting to a point where they converge in certain areas, like the deployment of line and space. Also because my photography is for the most part quite figurative, drawing lets me let go of this strict need for representation. The idea of duality has always been important to me as a person, and I think it’s healthy to embrace two sides that are paradoxical to each other. It’s an expanding of the consciousness. In photography I am isolating what’s already out there into a contained space, but in my drawing and painting, I often simply begin working on a piece of paper or what have you and work my way into the image. Either way, I’d say all my creative work is improvisatory in approach. It’s really about listening to your gut and going from there. I don’t ever know what kind of photo I’ll end up with on a given day or what a finished drawing would look like; I’m just letting the process and the act itself take me to my destination, which I always possess a good degree of faith that I’ll get there. Both are equally important to me and I don’t favor one over the other, they need to co-exist.

Blog posted by Dena Rash Guzman on August 29, 2012. Courtesy of Dena Rash Guzman

1 Editor’s note: Etel Adnan died in November 2021. »

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