“I see myself in him. The impossibility of belonging in this world.”
The artist Matthew Wong felt a deep kinship with Vincent van Gogh, and he expressed it with those words in a text message sent to his gallerist in 2018. Though the two artists lived more than a century apart, their lives were uncannily similar: They both became artists in their late 20s, garnered praise as painters of landscapes and were in their 30s when they died by suicide.
Mr. Wong, who was on the autism spectrum and had Tourette’s syndrome as well as chronic depression, was 35 when he took his own life in 2019.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is pairing the two artists in the exhibition “Matthew Wong, Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort” (which opens Friday and runs through Sept. 1). It’s part of a new series of contemporary-art exhibitions at the museum to “show that van Gogh’s work, as well as his life story, ideas and letters, continue to be relevant to artists working in our own time,” Emilie Gordenker, the museum’s director, said in an email.
The exhibition is by no means a compare-and-contrast exercise between the two painters. There are only six van Gogh works in the show — five paintings and a drawing — alongside 41 paintings and 21 works on paper by Mr. Wong.
“We’re not actually placing them next to each other, or placing them on a par with each other,” said the exhibition’s curator, Joost van der Hoeven. “We’re welcoming Matthew Wong into the house of van Gogh.”
Mr. Wong — who was Canadian and of Chinese heritage — was born in Toronto in 1984. He relocated to Hong Kong with his family when he was 7, but at 15 his family moved back to Toronto, where he graduated from high school.
After getting a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2007, he moved back to Hong Kong and took to writing poetry, which he shared with audiences at coffee shops and poetry clubs around town.
It wasn’t until 2010 that his artistic journey began in earnest. That year, Mr. Wong enrolled in a photography master’s program at the City University of Hong Kong. Yet by the time he graduated two years later, his focus had shifted to charcoal and ink drawing, and oil painting.
He began pouring ink on the pages of a sketchpad and joining up the pages to see what might happen. The resulting works on paper were covered with stains and blotches, yet attractively composed. Mr. Wong realized there and then that painting was his true voice, the curators said. He pursued it with drive and assurance.
“The surprising part for me was finding out how confident he was with painting from the very beginning,” said Vivian Li, who curated Mr. Wong’s first museum retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2022 and 2023.
Ms. Li said friends of Mr. Wong remembered his saying, “I will be a great painter” — not “in an egotistical way,” she explained, but in an indication that “he believed in his talents.”
Mr. Wong’s first career breakthrough came remarkably fast: in 2015, after his solo show at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Center. Images of his work started circulating online and around the world.
The next year, when Mr. Wong relocated to North America — first to the United States, then to Edmonton, Alberta — he was part of the group show “Outside” held at the Karma gallery’s temporary space in Amagansett, N.Y. One of his paintings sold immediately, and fame and fortune ensued.
“He developed so quickly, and he soaked up everything so quickly,” said Mr. van der Hoeven. “Within seven or eight years, he basically catapulted himself to the higher echelons of the American art world, which is highly improbable. But it did happen.”
Along the way, using the internet and social media, Mr. Wong gave himself an art education. He studied masterpieces of Western and Chinese art online. He set up a personal Facebook network that included both well-known and lesser-known U.S. and Canadian painters, who became his mentors.
In a word, “he used Facebook as a classroom,” Ms. Li said.
Artists who connected with Mr. Wong online were asked such basic questions as “Can you mix acrylic with oil?” Ms. Li said. He demonstrated such innocence and curiosity in his questions that, by the time he started showing in North America, those artist friends he made on Facebook were “championing him,” she said.
A very important source of inspiration — both personal and artistic — was van Gogh.
In a 2014 Facebook post, Mr. Wong positioned one of his own works next to one of van Gogh’s, Mr. van der Hoeven said. In a 2018 interview, he cited van Gogh as an influential forerunner. And three works painted in 2019, the year of his death — including “Starry Night” and “The Space Between Trees” — were open tributes to van Gogh.
“The Space Between Trees” is, in fact, a copy of a work by van Gogh that went missing in World War II titled “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.” The lone figure at the center has been replaced by an Edmonton park bench on which Mr. Wong spent many a distressful moment.
Like van Gogh’s chair, the bench “takes on the form of a symbolic self portrait,” Mr. van der Hoeven said. “By inserting that bench into van Gogh’s painting, he basically inserts himself into van Gogh’s work.”
Mr. Wong also began making connections with van Gogh’s life. Despite his sudden success — his 2018 solo show at Karma in Manhattan was a triumph, and his art-market prices soared — “he was left with the same holes in his heart that he had before,” Mr. van der Hoeven said. “It was at this time that he found comfort in van Gogh’s story.”
Mr. Wong took to illustrating his struggles the way van Gogh did: in wildly expressive brushstrokes and a deep palette of colors. And a month before his second solo exhibition at Karma, he took his own life.
Though his career was, like van Gogh’s, tragically cut short, “it did come to a conclusion, like a great arc, from the beginning to the end,” said Ms. Li of the Dallas Museum of Art. “That in itself can be celebrated.”
