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Matthew Wong: A Chronology
Vivian Li (Editor)
Description: Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances
Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances
Matthew Wong: A Chronology
Author
Vivian Li (Editor)
PublisherDallas Museum of Art
Copyright© 2022 by Dallas Museum of Art
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100099
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Matthew Wong: A Chronology
Veronica Myers
1984
March 8: Matthew Wong is born in Toronto, Canada.
1991
Wong moves with his family to Hong Kong.
1998
Wong is formally diagnosed with depression.
1999
Wong and his family return to Toronto.
He is formally diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome.
2003
Wong graduates from The York School in Toronto.
He enrolls as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
2007
April 28: Wong graduates with a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan.
He returns to Hong Kong and pursues various internship positions.
2008
Wong begins to share his poetry at poetry clubs around Hong Kong.
2010
Wong enrolls as a graduate student at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong.
2011
June 8: Wong writes a review for the Richard Prince exhibition for Time Out Hong Kong.
He serves as a docent at the 54th Venice Biennale for the Hong Kong Pavilion in November that highlights the work of Kwok Mang-ho, otherwise known as Frog King.
2012
Wong contributes his photography to diverse art and literature journals throughout the year, including Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Unshod Quills.
He pivots away from his focus on photography for his MFA and begins experimenting with charcoal and ink on paper; also he begins to teach himself how to work with oil paints.
March–December: Wong works part-time on digital collections in his role as a project assistant at the Asia Art Archive.
July 15: Wong graduates with a MFA in photography from the City University of Hong Kong.
2013
He secures his own studio space in Cuiheng in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, China (fig. 50).
October 31–November 10: Wong participates in the 8th Annual Song Zhuang Art Fair in Beijing.
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Description: Matthew Wong painting in his studio in Cuiheng, Zhongshan, Guangdong Province
Fig. 50. Matthew Wong painting in his studio in Cuiheng, Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, 2014.
2014
August 30–September 20: Wong has his first solo show, Matthew Wong: Chapter One, at the Cuiheng Art Museum in Zhongshan. His work is described as revealing his inner soul through the content of the worlds that he creates (fig. 51).
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Description: Installation view of "Matthew Wong: Chapter One" at the Cuiheng Art Museum...
Fig. 51. Installation view of Chapter One at the Cuiheng Art Museum in Zhongshan, 2014.
2015
February 4: Wong writes a review on the exhibition Ben Quilty: Straight White Male at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, for Ran Dian.
July 24: He writes a review on the Etel Adnan exhibition at White Cube, Hong Kong, for Ran Dian (fig. 52).
~
Description: Etel Adnan, White Cube, London
Fig. 52. Etel Adnan, White Cube, London, 2014.
October 19–October 23: Wong has the solo show Pulse of the Land at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre in Hong Kong (fig. 53). It includes a range of his work, including oil on canvas, ink on paper, and acrylic on paper.
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Description: Entrance to Matthew Wong's "Pulse of the Land" exhibition at the Hong Kong...
Fig. 53. Entrance to the Pulse of the Land exhibition at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, 2015.
2016
Wong travels to the United States and spends time in New York (fig. 54) and Michigan from February to April before spending three months painting in Los Angeles, after which time he settles in Edmonton, Canada, in July.
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Description: Matthew Wong attending artist talk at the "Insomnia exhibition," Pelham, New...
Fig. 54. Matthew Wong attending artist talk at the Insomnia exhibition, Pelham, New York, 2016.
July 16: Opening of the two-artist exhibition Good Bad Brush: Peter Shear and Matthew Wong at Occasional Gallery in Burlington, Washington.
August 6–August 27: Wong is featured in the group exhibition Cold Summer at The Provincial in Kaleva, Michigan, a multiuse flex space dedicated to supporting artists in the creation of new and experimental work.
September 3–September 25: Wong participates in the group exhibition Outside at Karma’s temporary gallery in Amagansett, Long Island, New York. Curated by Matthew Higgs, it included works by forty-two artists.
November 18–January 8, 2017: Wong takes part in the group exhibition Tom Friedman (+ The Birthday Show) at 1969 Gallery in New York. His work is displayed together with a blend of colorful and vibrant representational and abstract paintings.
2017
Wong is formally diagnosed with autism.
June 1–July 15: Wong is one of twenty-seven artists in the group exhibition Fleming Faloon at Office Baroque in Brussels, Belgium.
July 6–August 31: Wong is featured in the group exhibition The Horizontal at Cheim & Read in New York, which explores the poetry of the horizon in abstract art.
November 2–January 13, 2018: Wong participates in the group exhibition Plastic Surgery, to look like you at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Dallas. The three artists showcased are Andy Coolquitt, Guillaume Leblon, and Matthew Wong, who together examine the dialogue between representation and abstraction.
2018
March 22–April 29: Wong has his first solo show in the United States, Matthew Wong (fig. 55), at Karma in New York.
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Description: Installation view of "Matthew Wong" at Karma, New York
Fig. 55. Installation view of Matthew Wong at Karma, New York, 2018.
July 14–August 5: Wong takes part in the group exhibition Sky Above Clouds at Performance Ski in Aspen, Colorado, curated by Meredith Darrow and Olivia Davis.
September 28–October 28: Wong is among the artists in the group exhibition Monomania at George gallery in New York. The works on paper and sculptures in this show focus on spontaneity, impulsive directness, and a type of honed and focused passion.
October 22–September 30, 2019: Wong is included in the group exhibition Trance at the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon, curated by Albert Oehlen and including works from the Aïshti Foundation’s and Oehlen’s private collection.
2019
January 10–March 16: Wong has the solo show Day by Night at Massimo De Carlo in Hong Kong, a series of large-scale oil paintings of his signature imagined landscapes (fig. 56).
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Description: Installation view of Matthew Wong's "Day by Night" at Massimo De Carlo in...
Fig. 56. Installation view of Day by Night at Massimo De Carlo in Hong Kong, 2019.
January 19–January 26: Wong is featured in the group exhibition Reading Painting at Treasure Town in New York.
April 17: He participates as a panelist for a discussion on the book Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, together with Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and author and moderator Barry Schwabsky. He was also included in this publication.
June 27–August 2: Wong is included in the group exhibition Away in the Hill at GRIMM gallery in New York, which explores the individual’s relationships with place, natural ecology, and land, as well as the interplay between emotional and physical spaces.
July 27–September 7: Wong is among the artists in the group exhibition A Cloth Over a Birdcage at Château Shatto in Los Angeles, which highlights small-scale work made within physical constraints.
October 2: Wong dies by suicide in Edmonton, Canada. He was thirty-five years old.
November 8–January 5, 2020: A solo show of Wong’s work Blue at Karma in New York (fig. 57). This is the first posthumous exhibition of Wong’s art, which grapples with what Wong referred to as “the blueness of blue” and its activation of both individual and collective nostalgia.
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Description: Installation view of Matthew Wong's "Blue" at Karma, New York
Fig. 57. Installation view of Blue at Karma, New York, 2019.
2020
July 30–September 13: Wong is included in the group exhibition (Nothing but) Flowers at Karma in New York. His work coheres with that of the other forty-nine artists in the show around the central trope of the flower.
September 10–January 9, 2021: A solo show of Wong’s Postcards at ARCH in Athens, Greece, depicts twenty of his final works on paper. They explore the imagined landscape as well as the landscapes of his memory.
2021
March 1–September 3: A solo show of Wong’s work Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings 2013–2017 at Cheim & Read in New York. Comprised solely of his ink drawings on rice paper, it represents and highlights some of the artist’s first efforts in painting (fig. 58).
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Description: Installation view of "Matthew Wong: Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings...
Fig. 58. Installation view of Matthew Wong: Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings 2013–2017 at Cheim & Read, New York, 2021.
August 13–May 15, 2022: Blue View is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. This is the first museum exhibition dedicated to the artist, displaying more than forty paintings from his 2017–2019 Blue series.
September 2–September 29: Wong is included in the group show On Leaving at Modern Art in London with eight other artists.
2022
February 5–August 14: Wong participates in the group exhibition Abrasive Paradise at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, Netherlands. The twelve artists reflect on Piet Mondrian’s modernist dream to construct an earthly paradise.
April 21–June 10: Wong is included in the group show Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes at Acquavella Gallery in New York. The twenty-eight featured painters offer intergenerational perspectives and approaches to the landscape genre.
May 4–September 10: A solo show of Wong’s work Matthew Wong: The New World, Paintings from Los Angeles 2016 at Cheim & Read in New York, which presents paintings he made while living in Los Angeles in 2016.
October 16–February 19, 2023: A retrospective of Wong’s oeuvre Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Matthew Wong: A Chronology
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