Matthew Wong (born 1984 in Toronto, Ontario; died 2019 in Edmonton, Alberta) was a self-taught painter whose poetic and surreal compositions often depict lone figures in imaginary landscapes, or emotional interiors painted from memory. His paintings, rendered alternatively in gouache, watercolours, and oils, are an effervescent blend of shape, history, and sentiment. He conceived of his photographic practice as a cerebral and conceptual approach to the study of urban surfaces. His photos consider how the greater themes of humanity—such as life, death, and creation, among others—reflect upon such surfaces and give way to unexpected textures. In them, Wong weaves grand narratives from seemingly disparate subjects and calls to mind the pictorial influences of modernist painting. In addition to painting and photography, Wong also wrote creatively and critically. He received a degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media

For GTA24, the pieces included by Matthew Wong reflect the artist’s penchant for imagined vistas, and his consideration of themes including life, death, and creation.