Matthew Wong: Postcards

This fully illustrated volume collects Matthew Wong’s small-scale postcard paintings made during the last year of his life in 2019. As Winnie Wong writes in her newly commissioned essay for the book, “Art critics have observed that Matthew Wong's landscapes are ‘uncannily familiar,’ and they do prompt viewers to search our own memories, but he almost never titled them as places. Instead, he consistently named them as moments in time: midnight, 5:00am, dawn, daybreak, 12:30am, Autumn, Winter, the first snow, the gloaming, the moon rise … For the postcard is a genre that seems to consciously elude a sense of stable locus, yet marks the times of our lives when we tried to grasp it. Matthew Wong painted at home, on the road, and in the studio. He spoke of the compulsion to finish each of his paintings in a single sitting, and talked of them always as process, rather than subject matter. Standing before paintings he finished years ago, he could recall every stroke and mark as if he had placed them just moments before.”