'I see myself in him. The impossibility of belonging in this world,' said the late artist Matthew Wong whose first European retrospective is on view at Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
This poignant observation by the Chinese-Canadian artist of himself and Vincent Van Gogh, long profiled as the 'tortured artist', is bittersweet.
While working more than a century apart, both artists found painting later in life, at the age of 27. Van Gogh had tried his hand as an art dealer, school master, bookseller, and lay preacher. Wong received a master's degree in photography, but soon after, became disenchanted by the 'unnatural' medium and turned to painting.
'At first, I just bought a cheap sketch pad along with a bottle of ink.' he said. '[I] made a mess every day in my bathroom randomly pouring ink onto pages—smashing them together—hoping something interesting was going to come out of it.'
These early ink abstractions alongside his painted landscapes produced close to the end of his life are on show in Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort (1 March–1 September 2024).
Continuing a series of exhibitions on contemporary artists presented through the lens of the Dutch Modernist, the museum will exhibit over 60 works by Wong alongside a number of Van Gogh's, including The Bedroom (1888) and The Garden of the Asylum (1889).
For Wong, there were other muses too. Peter Doig, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, and Wu Guanzhong all weave into his work in some way or another. Yet it's the marrying of colour, of introspection, of brooding isolation that can be felt so fervently between these two.
Wong braved Tourette's syndrome, battled with depression, and was on the autism spectrum, while Van Gogh's internal battles—ear included—have been well-documented.
A glance at the cobalt blue and chromatic yellow tones taking shape across Van Gogh's Wheatfield (1888), or the twinkling moonlit sky of The Starry Night (1889) is immediately identifiable in Wong's melancholic landscapes reinforced with an intense mark-making that has been described as 'psychedelic pointillism.'
While other Wong landscapes such as The Space Between Trees (2019) are a direct tribute to Van Gogh and the bucolic cornfields of The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888).
While this 'impossibility of belonging' ultimately cut Wong's life short, such hardship gave him the emotional drive and visual tools to paint to a degree and subsequent acclaim that, like Van Gogh, belongs in history books.
