Matthew Wong

Matthew Wong (; March 8, 1984 – October 2, 2019) was a Canadian artist. Self-taught as a painter, Wong received critical acclaim for his work before his death in 2019 at the age of 35. Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic at The New York Times, has praised Wong as "one of the most talented painters of his generation."

Biography Wong was born in Toronto in 1984. His family emigrated to Hong Kong when he was seven. Wong then attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, completing a degree in cultural anthropology in 2007.

Wong had Tourette syndrome and suffered from depression throughout his adult life.

In 2016 he returned to Canada, settling in Edmonton. 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.”

Solo exhibitions and retrospectives 2025 Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort, Albertina Museum, Vienna 2024 Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 2023 The Realm of Appearances, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2022 The Realm of Appearances, Dallas Museum of Art 2021 Blue View, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 2019 Blue, Karma, New York 2019 Day by Night, Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong 2018 Karma, New York 2018 galerie frank elbaz, Paris, France 2015 Pulse of the Land, Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong

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.