Biography
Wong was born in Toronto in 1984. His family emigrated to Hong Kong when Wong was seven. When he was fifteen, his family returned to Canada, in part to support the treatment of Wong'sArt career
Wong's creative work began with experiments with photography in 2009 and continued during his time as a student of photography at City University in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied with the idea of becoming a photographer, in 2014 Wong told ''Neoteric Magazine'' that "towards the end of my degree I felt I had gained no real skills or prospects that could take me forward in the professional world." In 2012 he began experimenting with drawing. He began painting landscapes in 2014. In 2016 he returned to Canada, settling in Edmonton. Wong posted his paintings to Facebook and attracted the attention of Matthew Higgs, curator and director of White Columns Gallery. Wong attained his first institutional recognition when the Dallas Museum of Art acquired his work, ''The West,'' in 2017. The DMA was the only museum to acquire a painting by Wong during his lifetime. Wong went on to exhibit at galleries in New York and Hong Kong. Critic Jerry Saltz called Wong's 2018 solo exhibition at Karma Gallery “one of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while.” Due to their scarcity in the open market, Wong's works have attracted interest on the auction market. His Edmonton studio remains untouched.Solo exhibitions and retrospectives
* 2024 ''Matthew Wong , Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort'', Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam * 2023 ''The Realm of Appearances'',Collections
His work is included in public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Aishti Foundation and the Estée Lauder Collection.Record sale prices
In 2020, a small watercolor on paper simply called ''Untitled'' was sold for four times its original estimate price after attracting a number of bids. His first large painting available in an auction, ''The Realm of Appearances'', was sold in July 2020 for US$1.82 million, twenty times its original estimate. In December 2020, a painting called ''River at Dusk'' was sold for $4.86M, four times its original estimate.References
Further reading
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wong, Matthew 1984 births 2019 deaths 2019 suicides Artists from Toronto University of Michigan alumni 21st-century Canadian painters Canadian male painters Canadian expatriates in Hong Kong Place of death missing Artists who died by suicide Artists with autism Canadian artists with disabilities People with Tourette syndrome Canadian expatriates in the United States Canadian landscape painters Alumni of the City University of Hong Kong Canadian male artists Canadian contemporary artists Suicides in Alberta Hong Kong painters Canadian people of Chinese descent 21st-century Canadian male artists