Though he only practiced art for six years before his untimely death, in 2019, Matthew Wong’s poignant landscape paintings represent a singular talent tragically cut short. His first-ever museum retrospective—fittingly presented at the only institution that collected his work during his lifetime—presents a full scope of his oft-unpeopled landscapes ranging from panoramic vistas portrayed in iridescent patterns of dots to cool mountain landscapes delineated by long brushstrokes and washes, evoking styles from Post-Impressionism and Fauvism to 17th-century Qing period ink painters. 

“Matthew Wong was an artist with an intense drive,” says Dr. Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA. “Not only did he teach himself to paint, but he also tirelessly studied artists he admired, assimilating various elements of their work into his own. Yet in looking at his paintings, which are uncanny, captivating and so stylistically assured, it’s easy to forget this was someone working relentlessly to catch up with himself—and who the world was just beginning to catch onto.”

Pictured: The West (2017) by Matthew Wong. Collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Fund. © 2022 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Matthew Wong Foundation; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA).