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Matthew Wong Interiors

PALAZZO TIEPOLO PASSI, VENICE

CURATED BY JOHN CHEIM

ESSAY BY NANCY SPECTOR

MATTHEW WONG FOUNDATION 2026

Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage... (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas...) , 1946–66

7 feet 11 ½ inches x 70 inches x 49 inches, 242.6 x 177.8 x 124.5 centimeters, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969 © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2026, photo: Regan Vercruysse

Origin Story I

If time can be thought of as circular, as an endless looping of cycles, like waves lapping at the shore, then this story begins and ends in Venice. The city of light, of salt, of decrepit beauty, it is serenaded by the tide continuously splashing against its crumbling fortifications. Matthew Wong spent three months in this unforgettable city in 2011 as an intern for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale while simultaneously working

toward his MFA in Photography at the City University of Hong Kong. His experience of the art on view—namely Christopher Wool’s Rorschach-like abstractions in the Italian Pavilion and Julian Schnabel’s bold, gestural canvases at the Museo Correr—was epiphanic.

An astute and voracious consumer of art history—both Eastern and Western—Wong had until this formative moment only encountered

left: Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés (detail) ; right: Matthew Wong, Origin (Scarlet Lake), 2018

Untitled, 2016

Acrylic on paper, 12 x 9 inches, 30.5 x 22.9 centimeters