Artist field note

Matthew Wong

A short career; a remarkably complete pictorial world.

02 / 05

Tracks in a Blue Forest

2018

Tiny footprints cross pale ground and vanish into deep blue. We never see who made them. The trace makes the forest feel lonely but also brave: someone entered the darkness. Wong leaves us between being lost and choosing to go on. Perhaps his most powerful image, it makes beauty feel inseparable from disappearance.

The five in one idea

Wong used landscape less as a record of place than as an emotional construction. Beauty and loneliness can occupy the same path.