Matthew Wong’s, Alum, Hallucinatory Pilgrimages
Wong proceeds mark by mark without knowing in advance what will happen or where he will go.
I first saw images by Matthew Wong when he posted them on social media. Like others who read his posts, as well as read his interviews, I learned that he was living in Hong Kong and that he graduated from the University of Michigan (2007) with a degree in Cultural Anthropology. In 2012, after graduating from the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media with a MFA in photography, he began painting, initially starting with a sketch book and a bottle of ink and making “a mess every day randomly.”
In the online magazine Altermodernists (October 29, 2014), where I read the the previous citation, I also came across this statement by Wong:
"Art is all-encompassing in my daily life. When I’m not working, I’m at the library doing research into the history of art, figuring out where I can fit into the greater dialogue between artists throughout time, or on the internet looking at art-related websites and engaging in dialogue on social media with artists and art-world figures around the world."
In 2013, Wong and I had a brief exchange through the back channel of Facebook. He was trying to find a copy of my book, In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993) and wrote to me. We agreed to make a trade. I sent him a copy of the book and he sent me a pencil drawing.
