Art by Matthew Wong

Wong taught himself to paint in his late twenties, after already earning a photography MFA, and built a large, prolific body of work, reportedly over a thousand paintings, in the roughly five years before his death by suicide in 2019 at 35; he'd lived with autism, Tourette syndrome, and depression throughout his life. The only museum to acquire his work while he was still alive was the Dallas Museum of Art. Since his death, his prices have risen dramatically at auction, with paintings like "River at Dusk" and "Shangri-La" each selling for several million dollars, a posthumous market surge that's become its own well-documented, slightly uncomfortable story in the contemporary art world.