Matthew Wong and Vincent van Gogh shared more than a self-taught path into painting. Both began relatively late, worked in compressed time spans, and turned to painting as a lifeline. The superb exhibition Painting as a Last Resort, now on view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, brings their work into intimate and revealing dialogue. The exhibition presents approximately 44 paintings and 12 works on paper by Wong alongside a smaller selection by van Gogh. Organized in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Matthew Wong Foundation, the exhibition gives Wong space to be seen on his own terms. His paintings feel jittery, open, and emotionally charged.
Wong began painting at 27. In 2019, after years of living with depression, autism, and Tourette’s syndrome, he died by suicide at 35. The arc was shockingly brief. Only in 2017 did he begin working in the style he would become known for, but the output from these final years is breathtaking in both scope and intensity.
The show draws careful links between Wong and van Gogh through rhythm, color, pattern, gesture, and a shared sense of urgency. The works move across moods and time, offering a clear sense of Wong’s development—how he absorbed a range of influences and reimagined them through his own lens. Grouped thematically, the paintings highlight Wong’s interest in music, literature, daily surroundings, and the act of painting itself. His work pulses with movement—between places, traditions, and shifting inner states. The exhibition follows his growth while sustaining a persistent conversation with Van Gogh.
Wong’s art influences besides Van Gogh are wide and include Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Yves Klein, Peter Doig, Jonas Wood, and digital media. Chinese art history was equally significant. Raised between Canada and Hong Kong, Wong drew on artists such as Shitao and traditional techniques like ink on rice paper. The show includes striking examples from 2016, when he made large ink drawings almost daily. As Will Heinrich wrote in The New York Times about Wong’s 2021 drawing show at Cheim & Read, these dense, all-over ink compositions foreshadow the surfaces of his later oil paintings.
While van Gogh painted directly from life, Wong’s imagined landscapes were created entirely in the studio. This contrast points to a deeper conflict: the longing to belong and the impossibility of doing so. Wong described this feeling using the Portuguese word saudade—a melancholic, wistful yearning for a place or person that no longer, or never, existed. His paintings hold that tension. They evoke places of longing, but not ones found in the real world. “Something of profound feeling,” he wrote, “yet at once at an impossible, irreconcilable remove—the paradox that I feel is at the heart of my vision.”
In The Kingdom (2017), Wong depicts a forest of white birch trunks marked with black staccato patterns, creating an upward vertical rhythm. The ground pulses with vivid greens, yellows, and oranges. It’s a claustrophobic, sensory-dense scene with the surreal quality of a digital dream. At its center stands a small, ghost-like figure wearing an oversized crown—cartoonish, alone, and strangely commanding. The figure is vulnerable but defiant. Loneliness here radiates both pain and strength.
Solitary figures like this recur throughout Wong’s work—tiny, isolated presences within vast landscapes. They reflect his personal experience of loneliness but also speak to a broader condition: a quiet social diagnosis of contemporary life. In his final year, he painted almost exclusively in blue, producing works such as Blue Rain (2018) or Starry Night (2019).
Photo: Matthew Wong Foundation
Wong once described painting as his “last resort.” Like van Gogh, he also turned to writing—particularly poetry—as a way to stay connected. See You on the Other Side (2019), one of his final works, can read as a meditation on isolation and departure. A bay, represented as a white void, separates two embankments; a red heraldic bird floats near the divide, while green strokes suggest a distant willow. The composition—centered on the visual divide—evokes the emotional distance Wong wrote about. In a WhatsApp message, he implicitly recognized himself in van Gogh: “I see myself in him. The impossibility of belonging in this world.”
Wong’s absence is palpable throughout the exhibition. The work is so assured—so layered in emotion, structure, and form—that it’s impossible not to wonder what might have come next. What remains is already enough to place him among the most vital painters of his generation. The paintings stay with you long after you leave—some verge on panic, others offer a sense of calm or acceptance—but all carry a striking force. Their emotional and visual power is hard to shake
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Matthew Wong – Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort
Albertina Museum, Vienna On view from February 14 to June 19, 2025.
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