Unknown Pleasures

Matthew Wong · 2019

This is Unknown Pleasures, painted by Matthew Wong in two thousand nineteen — a landscape built from thousands of separate marks, by a painter who taught himself and had been working perhaps six years. The title he borrowed from a Joy Division record. Wong died later that same year, and this painting came to the museum from his parents, in his memory.

Medium Oil on canvas · Dimensions 65 × 65" (165.1 × 165.1 cm) · Credit Gift of Monita and Raymond Wong in memory of their son Matthew Wong

Hanging beside it in Gallery 201: Chronic Hollow, Oliver Twist

Works like this one elsewhere in the museum: The Olive Trees, Museum of Vulcanism, Saint-Ours-les-Roches, Auvergne, France, Exterior perspective