Wong was prolific, completing paintings in two or three days, said Dugan, who’s working on Wong’s catalogue raisonne. There were about 1,000 works in the estate at the time of his death.
Dugan met the artist in 2016 through curator Matthew Higgs, who included Wong in a group exhibition -- “Outside” -- of landscape paintings by outsider artists at Karma in the Hamptons. Two years later, the gallery gave Wong a solo show in New York. Jerry Saltz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for New York magazine, called it “one of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while.”
“The Realm of Appearances,” which depicts a richly patterned, jewel-toned meadow beneath a steel-gray night sky, was a centerpiece of the exhibition. In its auction catalog, Sotheby’s drew parallels between the landscape and works of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch.
Estimated at $60,000 to $80,000, the lot drew frenzied bidding from collectors in the U.S., Europe and Asia. All of the phone lines were jammed. Bids climbed to $500,000 within seconds -- and kept going until the hammer fell at $1.5 million, resulting in a return of about 6,700% for the anonymous seller.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.