The Matthew Wong retrospective, The Realm of Appearances is on display now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It is a moving exhibit with around 40 examples of the self-taught contemporary artist’s work. The retrospective spans the 6 short years of Wong’s career as an outsider artist after he began to paint and draw steadily until he took his life at the age of 35 in 2019. In the exhibit are some rare examples of his early work and a few of his more iconic later pieces. Like the tragic trope of many struggling artists before him, Wong’s fame has come mostly after his death– despite some level of critical acclaim during his career. This exhibit is the first US museum exhibition devoted to Wong’s work as well as the first museum retrospective to focus on Wong’s art.

Matthew Wong was born in Canada and when he was 7 his family emigrated to Hong Kong. They spent 8 years in Hong Kong before returning to Canada in 1999. He attended college at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he studied cultural anthropology. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he returned to Hong Kong and attended the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media where he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in photography. Wong was diagnosed in his twenties as being on the autism spectrum and having Tourette’s syndrome. According to his mother, he struggled throughout his life with depression. He said he saw painting as “a marker of time.” Wong was inspired by other artists such as Wu Guanzhong, Gustav Klimt, his artist friend Scott Kahn, and Milton Avery.

The retrospective is being held in the Henry and Lois Foster Gallery in the Linde Family Wing of the museum. It’s an out-of-the-way gallery tucked next to the Japanese garden, a lovely space for the exhibit that welcomes viewers to take their time and explore Wong’s work. The exhibit opens with several of Wong’s landscapes from the 2014-2016 period. The landscapes span several mediums including acrylic, oil, and ink. According to the museum label, Wong stated that through depicting landscapes he had discovered a way to “tap into a primordial energy which infuses both nature and the essence of humanity.” One of the first landscapes to catch my eye was “Sanctuary” an oil painting on canvas that was painted in 2015. It’s a large, imposing painting with green, orange, red, yellow, and teal blocks of color that move the eye upward beneath bold, vertical, indigo brush strokes that elicit the impression of trees clustered tightly together. The painting feels slightly chaotic and claustrophobic, giving the impression that the title may have been ironic. There is no path through the trees to a clearing or a cabin as there are in so many of his other landscapes, just the imposing cluster of trees. This painting came from Wong’s solo show “Pulse of the Land” which was held in October 2015.

Another landscape that caught my attention was “Gone till November.” This piece is much more chaotic than “Sanctuary” with a brown, earthy background and indigo waves at the bottom. Wong used oil paint to give the impression of pink blossoms on white twigs with green leaves springing from the center of the canvas. The blossoms and leaves are at once disorganized and delicate. The museum label theorizes that the blossoms are possibly bauhinia, a native Chinese plant, and emblem of Hong Kong.  Yet another of Wong’s landscapes was “River at Night” an oil on canvas painting from 2018. Here, a river runs through the center of a monochrome blue canvas. Tiny, square brush strokes give the painting texture, with a few long strokes representing plants and trees. The sky is striated blues with delicate, white stars.

Wong had many inspirations for his work using books, and internet sources as reference materials. He even did a landscape based on a photo of his friend’s dog that his friend sent via cell phone called “Landscape with Ella (For John Cheim)”. He was inspired by Chinese ink paintings to try his hand at ink on Asian paper. The results are stunning with pieces like “Heaven and Earth”, “Where Did the Time Go?”, and several untitled ink paintings. One such untitled piece from 2014 is on a large, horizontal rectangular piece of paper. On it, black lines intersect in a loose crosshatch pattern with the ink bleeding into the negative space at the intersections of the lines. It results in a striking grid of imperfectly formed squares, some of which are full of ink blooms. Another of the ink paintings is” Where Did the Time Go?”  A large, vertical rectangular piece of paper covered in scrawled cross-hatched lines tightly knit together. The lines cover the paper entirely except for an egg-shaped patch of negative space in the center. It’s a bold piece that really draws viewers in. A passing patron said to another of the painting “This is really cool.” Before stopping to take a photo of it.

We see themes repeated in Wong’s work such as paths through the woods to a place of sanctuary or lone King-like figures on mini thrones surrounded by the woods. The forests are often covered in snow or shrouded in fog. The back of a viewer’s head with just a hint of their shoulders or a lone tree masterfully gives scale to the scene being viewed. There are plenty of well-placed trees and plants, with the occasional minuscule figure to provide additional scale.  Wong’s work is both chaotic and ordered simultaneously to beautiful effect. A deep longing for a place of safety and peace is evident in his paintings. The show runs through February 18, 2024.