Matthew Wong: Footprints In The Wind

Matthew Wong

footprints in the wind

Matthew Wong

Matthew Wong

footprints in the wind ink drawings 2013-2017 cheim & read

As a Nomad Traversing Ideas dawn chan When Matthew Wong’s paintings made their 2018 debut in New York, it was immediately evident that the artist, thirty-four at the time, was fluent in multiple painterly languages drawn from both Chinese and European art history, while also being adept at making work that was singularly his own. Wong wrangled trees, rooftops, paths, and stretches of sky into tender compositions that could alternately function as allegorical and psychological space. Few artists are able to do what he could: to merge their sweeping vision with a willingness to be vulnerable.

From the outset, critical responses to Wong’s art were marked as much by their fervor as they were by their invocations of the great masters seen as influences in Wong’s oeuvre. In The New York Times, Roberta Smith deemed Wong “one of the most talented painters of his generation” and found elements of “Chinese landscape painting, Van Gogh, Vuillard, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd.” Jerry Saltz called the show “one of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while,” and identified strands of Vuillard, Picasso, Chardin, Matisse, Julian Schnabel, and Grandma Moses. John Yau pronounced Wong’s art “simultaneously visceral and optical,” and spotted echoes of the early realism of Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner, and Elmer Bischoff. Critics throwing their weight behind an emerging artist will often hesitate before comparing them to canonized greats, lest the heft of such comparisons crush the young painter in question. There was no such hesitation here.

It spoke to the sheer talent evident in Wong’s paintings, and also their humility: their ability to dialogue with painters past while giving one the sense that all this work was powered by an unwavering, singular point of view.

Left: The artist at work in his studio in Edmonton, Canada, circa 2016.

But sooner or later, many artists with transnational origins, like Wong—who grew up in Canada the son of Chinese parents, and lived for a time in Hong Kong and had a studio in Zhongshan, China—face a difficult and yet inevitable question: To which cultural patrimonies ought their work lay claim? In trying to understand art made by someone like Wong, for whom shifting cultural contexts was a part of growing up, the most obvious approach is to identify names of European and Chinese artists who served as inspiration. But the presence of multiple art-historical lineages in Wong’s work is more complex. His experience in multiple worlds may have given Wong access to parallel histories of art and contemporary culture, but such a multiplicity of contexts also expands how an artist cultivates a dialogue with his predecessors in an artwork, and what the presence of that dialogue might mean.

The degree to which Chinese literati painters valued copying previous masters’ paintings, just as one example—the way they pursued direct imitation as homage, even while also honing their own individual styles—finds little analogue in Western painting traditions. Drawing similarly few parallels in Western art history is the extent to which the artistic practices of China’s most influential literati painters were tied so inextricably to their non-artist roles as civil servants, court officials, or even descendants of royal families. As such, a painter’s decision to reference an earlier era’s aesthetic could signal loyalty to a waning political order. A Chinese literati painter’s subversion of traditional painting techniques could underscore his eroded political stature in the face of a recent dynastic upheaval. A mountainous landscape painted in monastic exile might represent an escapist retreat from oppressive real-world conditions. In her examination of the Qing-dynasty painter Shitao, the Hong Kongbased scholar Eva Kit Wah Man saw his landscape paintings as the “ritual practice of political mourning, in the form of his restless creation of different spaces of interior exile.” 1 We know that Wong specifically fixed his attention on the art of Shitao, as well as those of his contemporary, Bada Shanren. Both artists were famous for pushing the envelope in their work—for moving ink painting towards surprising moments of expressive abstraction. Their influence is deeply integrated in Wong’s own works.

Wong maintained a committed ink-art practice, making an ink painting every morning. Painting immediately after waking, before food or coffee, he experimented boldly with the medium, pouring paint and letting it pool on the page.

The earliest two works on view at Cheim & Read, Untitled, 2013, (plate 1), and Untitled, 2014, (plate 2), respectively, have traces of Bada Shanren and Shitao’s transgressive, uninhibited mark-making. Highly abstract, Wong’s paintings are nonetheless

suggestive of landscapes, with their horizontal orientation and repeated elements that seem to trace out vegetation in the distant background. The painting from 2013 features a portentous shape at the fore, surrounded by ink marks of a lighter shade that give the impression of a glistening, turbulent atmosphere in the distance. There is certainly a division between figure and ground. The figure itself, however, is a silhouette, the nature of its agenda ominous but ultimately unknowable. Another untitled work from 2014 (plate 3) is more minimal with its grid-like composition. Robert Motherwell (himself a devotee of East Asian brush painting) seems to be present here, in the painting’s juxtaposition of ink-blot forms, deployed as a systematic way to both crowd and divide up space. One might also imagine, in this work, a wryly playful reference to the grids on rice paper used by students of calligraphy.

As Wong continued to make paintings into 2015, there was a turn of sorts—as he began to welcome the aura of myth and narrative into the work. Meticulous, repeated brushwork also started to conjure the precise carvings of woodblock prints, even while the frequent presence of poured ink forms made the compositions read as painterly portraits. As often as not, the subjects of these portraits remain in shadow, ambiguous flower bulbs, human figures, or rock formations. Only in the suggestion of a slouch or a crouch, or the folds of a cloak or the pairings of two dots as eyes, is a viewer’s hunch confirmed: that the paintings indeed feature animate beings—maybe even people engaged in sublime encounters with the natural world.

As if a direct refutation of traditional styles of gongbi painting, where ink was used to meticulously delineate and articulate the subjects in a scene, Wong seemed drawn instead not just to the xieyi style, but specifically to poured ink’s inherent ability to flow in large swaths—and thereby to obscure information, to withhold, to let questions linger. In Late Afternoon, 2016, (plate 19), an ink shape nominally suggests the contours of a kneeling figure. This central form’s left edge bleeds into the paper. The surrounding grass represented by Wong’s brushwork deftly stops short of meeting that feathery edge, turning a delicate strip of un-painted white page into a fuzzy, gossamer surface that seems to glint in the sunlight. It is a moment of pure visceral joy.

Such moments contrast the agitation conjured by a work like Untitled, 2015, (plate 9), in which a net seems to muzzle the face of a portrait subject looking none too pleased. In a grove beyond this figure, meanwhile, the riotous patterns that emerge between tree bark’s striations and the repetition of the vertical tree trunks themselves converge into an optically satisfying pattern.

The winding paths found in so many of Wong’s oil paintings are presaged in their ink counterparts here. In Odyssey, 2017, it is the viewer being led down one such path,

which winds through a cave to extend toward a horizon line. In The Performance, 2017, (plate 25), a painted figure in billowing dress moves across a tightrope-like passage, arms wide open, as if either for balance or to hold concentric rings around it, a bit like the full-body halos that encircle the Bodhisattvas in Buddhist art. Wong seemed to reserve his most intricate brushwork for the biomorphic and geomorphic textures of his environs. Lines denote literal object surfaces, but just as often evoke ephemeral phenomena: sunlight and energy fields, atmospheric disturbances, and atmospheric perspective—distant mountain peaks melt into the sky in The Performance. As such, the works pay homage in part to painters active in the Southern Song Dynasty (which flourished in the 10th and 11th centuries out of Hangzhou, China)— painters who used ink to capture mood and fluctuating natural phenomena: whether evening rain, or distant clouds settled into the foothills of mountains. But Wong’s paintings The Sun, 2016, (plate 21), and The Watcher, 2017, (plate 22), also evoke some of the frenetic mark-making that Van Gogh deployed to capture the ineffable energy the eye perceives in, say, a stretch of open sky. In Wong’s work, astonishingly, the blackness of ink itself is somehow deployed to conjure the dazzling retinal effects of the sun’s rays.

Given Wong’s own daring ink experimentation, there is little doubt he was drawn to Bada Shanren and Shitao’s art for their innovative treatment of their medium.

But the fact also remains: the paintings by both these Qing artists were also fundamentally colored by their personal experiences with escape, withdrawal from society, and questions of return. (As scions of the Ming royal family, both lived out much of their lives under the threat of persecution by the ensuing Qing dynasty.) That isn’t to necessarily imply that Wong was analogously concerned with questions of exodus and alienation. Nonetheless, to understand the full appeal of these two Qing dynasty painters’ landscapes as they were referenced in Wong’s work, we might perhaps take the liberty of reaching across time and space, to a term coined much later in the West: the notion of the heterotopia as articulated by Michel Foucault. While the French philosopher named boarding schools, museums, and boats as tangible examples of real-life heterotopias, he also specifically described the function of more illusory heterotopias: Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory…. Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.2

Might the landscapes that Wong studied themselves be heterotopias? Or the ones he made? After all, the startling, wakeful qualities of his imagined worlds seem to unsettle and contrast our relationships with our real surroundings. It is intriguing to see his invented vistas as spaces in which his real life was “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”

Telllingly, Wong titled the last paintings in this group of works Valley for Picabia, 2017, (plate 23), invoking yet another artist whose ceaseless experiments defied expectations. Wong’s piece uses dots of different saturations to depict the folds and crags of a sweeping valley scene, and indeed Picabia himself began his career with experimentations in pointillism. One must wonder, though, if Wong’s interest in Picabia was not only rooted in the French painter’s specific stylistic forays, but in Picabia’s range—his roving interests and capacity for self-reinvention. These were qualities that were seemingly shared by the young artist, who studied anthropology as an undergraduate, pursued an MFA in photography, and then taught himself ink painting before turning to oils. Picabia once wrote, “What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make of myself at every moment a new man.”

Perhaps that quote would have resonated with Wong. One can now only speculate.

By the time many of us had the chance to learn about his art, Wong was already gone.

Diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and Autism, he had also struggled with depression. He died by suicide in October of 2019, at the age of thirty-five. It’s painful to remember that one can no longer seek him out and reciprocate his penchant for seeking out others, for striking up conversations online. On social media, he began a discussion with John Cheim that eventually led to a meeting between the two, whereupon the gallerist purchased one of Wong’s ink paintings. The connections Wong made in real life and the connections his art built to painters past will resonate with those of us who see glimpses of our own diasporated experiences reflected in Wong’s transnational background—those of us who felt a certain distance no matter where we went. As Picabia had also once declared, “One must be a nomad and traverse ideas as one would travel through countries and cities.” In a different world, one can only wonder where Wong—as that nomad traversing ideas—might have gone next. notes 1. Man, Eva Kit Wah, “Spiritual Rituals of Chinese Ink Painting: The Suggestions of Shitao,” Contemporary Aesthetics 17 (2019): Article 15.

2. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Architecture /Mouvement/Continuité, October, 1984; (Lecture “Des Espace Autres,” March, 1967. Translated from the French

by Jay Miskowiec).

1. Untitled, 2013. Ink on rice paper. 15 1/2 x 27 inches / 39.4 x 68.6 cm

2. Untitled, 2014. Ink on rice paper. 31 x 57 1/2 inches / 78.7 x 146.1 cm

3. Untitled, 2014. Ink on rice paper. 30 3/4 x 57 1/4 inches / 78.1 x 145.4 cm

4. Untitled, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 26 3/4 x 22 1/8 inches / 67.9 x 56.2 cm

5. Untitled, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 36 7/8 x 34 1/4 inches / 93.7 x 87 cm

6. A Poet’s World, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 62 3/4 x 31 1/2 inches / 159.4 x 80 cm

7. Untitled, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 41 1/8 x 37 1/8 inches / 104.5 x 94.3 cm

8. Snowfall, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 41 1/4 x 37 1/2 inches / 104.8 x 95.3 cm

9. Untitled, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 26 5/8 x 21 3/4 inches / 67.6 x 55.2 cm

10. Stargazing, 2015. Ink on rice paper. 44 1/2 x 37 1/4 inches / 113 x 94.6 cm

11. Heaven and Earth, 2015. Ink on rice paper.

70 x 74 inches / 177.8 x 188 cm

12. Inside the Flower Cave, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 36 7/8 x 34 1/8 inches / 93.7 x 86.7 cm

14. Footprints in the Wind, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 38 x 35 inches / 96.5 x 88.9 cm

15. Where Did The Time Go?, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 70 x 38 1/4 inches / 177.8 x 97.2 cm

16. Two Flowers, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 41 x 37 3/4 inches / 104.1 x 95.9 cm

17. Winter Wind, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 31 3/4 x 27 1/8 inches / 80.6 x 68.9 cm

18. Landscape of the Longing, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 54 1/2 x 27 5/8 inches / 138.4 x 70.2 cm

19. Late Afternoon, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 19 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches / 50.2 x 47.6 cm

20. Spring, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 38 x 35 inches / 96.5 x 88.9 cm

21. The Sun, 2016. Ink on rice paper. 37 x 34 1/4 inches / 94 x 87 cm

22. The Watcher, 2017. Ink on rice paper. 43 3/4 x 42 inches / 111.1 x 106.7 cm

23. Valley for Picabia, 2017. Ink on rice paper. 14 x 16 inches / 35.6 x 40.6 cm

24. Landscape with Bather, 2017. Ink on rice paper. 28 1/2 x 23 inches / 72.4 x 58.4 cm

25. The Performance, 2017. Ink on rice paper. 34 1/2 x 28 inches / 87.6 x 71.1 cm

26. Odyssey, 2017. Ink on rice paper. 42 x 39 3/4 inches / 106.7 x 101 cm

matthew wong (b. 1984, Toronto, CA; d. 2019, Edmonton, Canada) was a selftaught Canadian painter who lived and worked between Zhongshan, China, and Edmonton, Canada. Born in 1984 in Toronto, he earned a BA in 2007 in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in 2013 in photography from the School of Creative Media of the City University, Hong Kong. The artist rose to international prominence in 2017. Wong’s painting was included in a group exhibition, The Horizontal, at Cheim & Read, which was illustrated in the show’s review in The New York Times by Will Heinrich. His first solo exhibition was presented at Karma in New York in 2018, and Massimo de Carlo in Hong Kong in 2019. The artist died shortly before his second solo exhibition was scheduled to open in New York at Karma, also in 2019. A posthumous exhibition of his work, organized by Julian Cox, is planned to open this year at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Published on the occasion of the Cheim & Read exhibition Matthew Wong: Footprintgs in the Wind, Ink Drawings 2013 — 2017 May 5 – September 11, 2021 We would like to thank Monita and Raymond Wong design John Cheim essay Dawn Chan production Stephen Truax assistant Peyton Ayers research Yi-Hsuan Chiu photography Alex Yudzon printer Graphicom isbn 978-1-944316-17-4 © 2021 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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