Night and Day: Matthew Wong’s ‘Imagined Landscapes’

Description

Day by Night is self-taught Chinese painter Matthew Wong first exhibition in China. His practice encompasses both oil paintings and gouaches. Wong’s unconventional representations of nature are created by blending diverse traditions in painting, ranging from Chinese ink art, post-impressionism, symbolism to high modernism.

This exhibition consists of eight large-scale oil paintings of day and night views that correspond to one another: Wong first intuitively painted a day scene before creating its night counterpart through a recalibration of the chromatic elements. The process’s call-and-response nature underlines the similarities and differences between the images, emphasising memory and feeling rather than strict mimesis. Wong’s emotive application of colour evokes the perceptual sensation of watching the light change as a day wears on.