NEW YORK, NY.- Accompanying a landmark solo exhibition presented at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi during the 2026 Venice Biennale,
Matthew Wong: Interiors features never-before-seen paintings and works on paper that foreground the artist's flair for domestic interior spaces. The exhibition, which is curated by John Cheim, also features an essay by leading curator and critic Nancy Spector that draws upon newly released archival material held by the Matthew Wong Foundation.
In his work, Wong investigates interiority as a critical locus for resistance, reflection and gradual transformation. Through the mediums of painting and drawing, he interrogates the spatial and affective registers of the interior—both as a literal, architectural space and as a metaphor for psychological depth. These works engage with the tensions between containment and expression, memory and presence, proposing a mode of aesthetic experience that privileges introspection, slowness and affective resonance over spectacle or immediacy. As critic Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, "These paintings are extremely open and vulnerable. But once they lure you in, they leave you alone to explore their chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities."
The Matthew Wong Foundation’s major exhibition Manhew Wong: Interiors marks a poignant return of the late artist’s work to Venice, a city that deeply inspired him. On view from May 6 to November 1, 2026 at the historic Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, the exhibition features 38 rarely seen and never-before-exhibited paintings by Wong, curated by his mentor John Cheim. The first exhibition dedicated to Wong’s domestic and psychological spaces, Interiors explores the “chambers of the mind” as a recurring motif in Wong’s art, seen as a place of both sanctuary and solitude.
In 2011, while serving as a docent for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Wong experienced “epiphanic” encounters with the works of Christopher Wool and Julian Schnabel. A trained photographer, Wong set aside his camera for brushes, beginning a self-taught journey into painting and experimentations that would lead to international acclaim. Yet Wong did not leave his training as a photographer behind; he translated it onto the canvas. The paintings on view in Manhew Wong: Interiors capture the haunting moods as his photos, prioritizing the emotional aura of a place over the details of the people within it.
The exhibition also foregrounds Wong’s recurring “tunnel and aperture” motifs—found in works such as Beautiful Morning (2016) and Origin (2019)—which serve as liminal symbols for transition, birth, and the “womblike” places of the mind. The works also synthesize a range of modernist influences, from the intimist environments of Edouard Vuillard and the psychologically charged rooms of Vincent van Gogh to the radical experimentation of Henri Matisse’s Red Studio.
Matthew Wong (1984–2019) was a self-taught Chinese-Canadian painter whose emotionally charged works earned him international recognition during a career that lasted only seven years. Born in Toronto and raised between Canada and Hong Kong, Wong earned a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. The artist, who lived with autism, Tourette’s syndrome, and depression, died by suicide in Edmonton at the age of thirty-five.
Wong began painting seriously in 2012, initially exploring abstraction before opting for figuration in 2015. He developed a distinctive visual language that blended Chinese, European, and American artistic traditions. Working primarily in oils, gouache, and ink, Wong created luminous imaginary landscapes and introspective interiors that are characterized by a striking sense of color and dynamic mark-making. His compositions, often drawn from memory, evoke solitude and longing.
Wong’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Morgan flibrary, New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Dallas Museum of Art; and The York School, Toronto. The first comprehensive retrospective of his work was presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2021, followed by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2022 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2023. In 2024, the Van Gogh Museum staged a major exhibition pairing Wong’s paintings with those of Van Gogh, one of his greatest influences. The exhibition subsequently traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
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