April 17, 2018
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This young Chinese-Canadian artist, a self-taught painter with degrees in anthropology and photography, startles with eye- and heart-seizing abstracted landscapes and fantasias. Wong’s mode is decorative—powerfully so—with cobbled brushstrokes and saturated colors; Pointillism, Fauvism, Klimt, and Bonnard come to mind not as influences but, rather, as collegial parallels. Wong’s compositions cohere emotionally, before you are done looking, like cadenzas. His watercolors are little rhapsodies of the everyday. When were you last wowed by a bowl of cherries?