작품 상세

Great Wave, 2017 Oil on canvas 48 x 72 in (121.9 x 182.9 cm) Matthew Wong B. 1984, Toronto, Canada Chinese-Canadian artist Matthew Wong is a self-taught painter with degrees in anthropology and photography. Wong’s painting practice can be considered a highly personal and intuitive synthesis of tendencies existing across art history ranging from Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, Classical Chinese ink art and carved lacquerware, to Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and the systematic process-based paint application one can see across artists as diverse as Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama. Thematically, Wong’s stylistically varied paintings are unified by an idiosyncratic view of nature as something that is at once an existing cosmic order and a metaphor for the architecture of the mind. The forests, oceans and mountains in Wong’s paintings simultaneously convey a heightened perception of the visible natural world in its unknowable majesty as they do the passageways of personal memory and lived experience. Great Wave may immediately recall the Japanese Ukiyo-e master Hokusai Katsushika’s iconic depictions of Mount Fuji and the sea. Wong transcends established pictorial precedents through a compositional design that pushes the motif into near-abstraction and the overwhelming presence of the wave allows the viewer to feel absorbed within its cycle. The visceral handling of pigment results in a scene imbued with a notion of light that verges on the hallucinatory or dreamlike. Wong’s portrayal of the surging wave set against the backdrop of a distant mountain and late day sky assumes a sensory intensity that does not necessarily correspond with the observable environment, but rather suggests an elemental presence that emphasizes the primordial essence of these natural forces. Courtesy of the Artist and Karma Fair Market Value: $18,000