Brent Wong

[NZBC]

Brent Wong was born in 1945, living his early life in Wellington and becoming interested in modern art at the age of 16. For several years he experimented with various abstract styles before coming to prominence in the late 1960s with his distinctive paintings of landscapes with monolithic structures.

These symbolic works continued until the early 1970s when he concentrated mainly on landscape, often including buildings and cloud forms. In the late 1970s he departed from his usual practice of piecing together works from his imagination and began painting small studies of dusk cloud images he had seen from his studio. From these developed a major series of paintings - the 'light and energy works' which he continues to work on today.

The two exhibited works date from the 1990s and are developed from a series of seascapes painted a decade earlier.

[NZBC]

Architect of alienation
By : Wong, Gilbert
In : Metro (Auckland), Feb 2004; n.272:p.92-93
Journal Article
Abstract : Profiles the painter and talks to him about his art.
Subject : Paintings
About : Wong, Brent (Auckland)

Url of this record - innz.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=420799

[NZBC]

Brent Wong : surrealism in a bland landscape
By : Hutchings, P A E
In : Islands, Sum 1972; v.1 n.2:p.117-136
Journal Article
Abstract : Examines the work of the surreal artist, and reproduces 15 of his works. Notes his 1969 Wellington exhibition.
Subject : Paintings
Art history
Drawings
About : Wong, Brent (1945-, Wellington)

Url of this record - innz.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=393203

[NZBC]

brent wong - painter

beginnings - early works
unfinished works
land & seascapes
light & energy works
shop
reference

Abandoned Works 1970 - 2008 exhibition/panorama


This Site

The purpose of this site is to publish and catalogue some the works of Brent Wong. Essentially a visual presentation with notes, it contains samples of early works, unfinished paintings, land and seascapes, and light and energy works.

Born in New Zealand in 1945, Brent Wong spent the early part of his life in the capital, moving north to the main commercial centre for a time, before settling on the west coast.

Brent Wong's work has variously been described as " surrealistic", "realist" and " visionary". While "surrealism" and "realism" may be attributed to certain phases of his work, the artist believes that there is a high level of symbolic content in most of his paintings - reflecting autobiographical material.

Over the past twenty years his interest in the meditative nature of the static image has deepened.

In 2008, Brent abandoned painting to explore music composition, a field that has interested him since the beginning of his painting career.

For more about Brent Wong visit the following websites:

www.resourcebooks.co.nz/brent_wong-an_iconic_nz_painter.html

www.ceacprojectspace.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/brent-wong-abandoned-works-1970-2008-by.html

www.brentwong-painter.com/

[NZBC]

Brent Wong (1945- )
An iconic painter in New Zealand

Brent Wong's body of work has been rightly described as 'surrealist', 'realist' and 'visionary'. His paintings are a rich canvas of colour expressed in a series of instantly recognisable landscapes, skyscapes and seascapes. Their haunted eerie quality is emphasised by the absence of people and blind windows in sparse buildings that seem accidental to the canvas. Immensely symbolic, his works reflect a synthesis of his experiences, the empty vacated landscapes around Wellington, and the inner life of the land. With all this also comes an impressive technical mastery of the medium. His works are now in the forefront of iconic New Zealand painting.

Neil Rowe described his early life in an article in Art New Zealand, #12 Winter 1979. In summary: Born in Otaki in 1945, his family moved to Wellington in 1949 where they lived in a flat above his uncle's shop in Vivian Street in the heart of Wellington city. The buildings of the inner city - their rooftops and architectural ornament - constitute dominant recurring motifs throughout his early work. Apart from a brief few months of unsatisfactory tuition at Wellington Polytechnic in 1963, Brent Wong is an entirely self-taught painter.

In 1965 he worked as a young copy-holder on Wellington’s Dominion newspaper. As well as providing the young painter with inexhaustible supplies of newsprint, the reading-room introduced him to a circle of writers and musicians and a motley assortment of intellectuals, political polemicists and malcontents traditionally attracted to newspaper reading rooms. The intellectual stimulus of these two years on the Dominion was reflected in his painting, engendering his deep abiding interest in philosophy and music. On the sheets of newsprint Brent drew the architectural ornaments and devices that fascinated him and through which he solved problems of perspective and chiaroscuro. These doodles were the forerunners of the motifs found in many of his paintings.

1967 marked a turning point. That year eight drawings were accepted for exhibition at the New Zealand Academy; and, ironically, a prolonged period of illness enabled him to paint full-time. The bleak exterior of the building opposite his room was the subject of Window 1967, his first work to deal explicitly, if unconsciously, with claustrophobia, which in the paintings that followed was developed to a Kafkaesque intensity, giving his body of works an uncanny power. These paintings transcend mere inward-looking subjectivity to become terrifying statements of loneliness and alienation that have a universal validity.

Then in 1969, at twenty-four years old, Brent Wong hung twelve paintings at the then Rothmans Gallery - his first one-man exhibition. The impact of these surreal haunting enigmatic paintings, with their startlingly original imagery and excellence of production, excited extravagant critical attention. Rowe concludes: Overnight they established Brent Wong as an important New Zealand painter.

From this point on Wong's technique and imagery were consolidated into a characteristic immediately identifiable style; and his works evolved and deepened through the decades, gradually gaving way to a more reflective and philosophical approach.
In 1980 he moved north to Balmoral in Auckland, then out to Muriwai Beach on the north-west coast outside Auckland in 1989. It was during this period that he began on a series of meditative images depicting light and energy.
In 2008, in a final expression of surreal philosophical renunciation, he abandoned painting altogether. He now turned his attention to contemplative aural images and musicomposition.

In his works Brent Wong uses the classic surrealist device of juxtaposing incongruous elements in his work and, although aesthetic considerations certainly are important to him, it is the clarity of the unintentionally revealed inner world which gives his paintings their extraordinary strength, tension and wide appeal.
Often derelict uninhabited structures live in relentlessly flattened landscapes that are seemingly suspended in the process of change and mutation. The viewer becomes as aware of what is not there as of what is actually painted. The conspicuous absence of human life seems caused by the ghost-like hovering mechanical constructions or to the silent malevolent supernatural power emanating from the landscape itself.
These are truly 'inner landscapes' constructed from remembered, half-remembered or wholly-imagined elements of the real world. In these worlds everything hangs in a delicate precarious balance. Breathe once and they could change. Such inner / outer worlds can also be seen in paintings as ‘Diagram 1972’, in which a locomotive emerges from what the artist described as 'a tunnel of mirrors'.
A painting that expresses these signature forms is 'Caravan’. Here a vast floating architectural structure, as pale as a cloud, dominates a blue hallucinogenic sea and sky. The land it hovers over is classic Wong: dry as a bone, sparse and empty, and reminiscent of landscapes seen in the Wairarapa and elsewhere in New Zealand.

A constant factor in Brent Wong's paintings is the sky. His clouds have a lofty permanence in a bright sky that is somehow at odds with their true nature, contrasting with a dry landscape below and irrelevant human activity. For him the sky is now a source of joyous inner optimism, over-arching the dry and empty land below.

Almost unique in New Zealand art, Brent Wong brings the spiritual and psychological together in a tense hallucinogenic landscape of real and imagined forms. He is deservedly amongst a very small cadre of New Zealand iconic painters who represent a generational sea change to true modernism. As a result, the works of Brent Wong are eagerly sought after by collectors.

[nzbc]

brent wong - painter

beginnings - early works
unfinished works
land & seascapes
light & energy works
shop
reference

Abandoned Works 1970 - 2008 exhibition/panorama