Brent Wong: Building with Landscape and Clouds
Brent Wong’s surreal, dreamlike landscapes offer more than a striking vision of New Zealand’s natural environment—they probe the uneasy relationship between permanence and transience, nature and human presence. In his 1975 piece up for auction at Works of Art, Building with Landscape and Clouds, an empty Victorian villa, meticulously rendered and oddly out of place, becomes a symbol of fleeting human occupation set against the enduring backdrop of land and geological time. Art historian and associate professor Lynda Tyler delves into this piece ahead of its auction.
Webb’s Wellington gallery featuring artworks by Brent Wong and several other artists from the Works of Art catalogue
Known for his skill in depicting New Zealand landscapes, modified for farming and parched by summer sun, Brent Wong heightens their enduring quality by creating a contrast with the temporary nature of human occupation, symbolised by the placement of empty colonial villas in the scene. Here, the view of the Victorian house is side on. It looms up close to the viewer, the bay window jutting out and the steep gable with tiny finial atop familiar in every detail yet strangely dislocated. Plonked down in this coastal scene, it encroaches on the peaceful forms of the everlasting hills and the bright blue inlet like a nosy neighbour.
Compared to the notion of deep time in geology – the vast timescale of Earth’s history, which spans billions of years – this century-old building is just a temporary intrusion. The structure itself is solitary and appears to be quickly deteriorating, with rusty corrugated iron, and dingy white paint on the weatherboards. It operates a bit like a memento mori in Dutch still-life painting, showing how futile and inconsequential our efforts are at making ourselves at home here, while the Earth follows its own logic, working to a greater and more portentous time scale. The temporality of human existence is emphasised, compared to the timeless land.
Lot 54. Brent Wong, Building with Landscape and Clouds, 1975, acrylic on board, 663 x 606mm. EST. $80,000—$120,000
Born just after VJ day in 1945, Brent Wong was the third of four children born to a Mainland Chinese father and New Zealand mother in Ōtaki, north of Wellington. They moved to Vivian Street, a downtown Wellington location that gave him the opportunity to draw studies of Victorian and Edwardian weatherboard houses just like this one. Wong began a fine arts course at the nearby Wellington Technical College in March 1963, but soon left, dissatisfied. A long illness meant he qualified for the Sickness Benefit, which enabled him to paint full-time. He had his first exhibition of drawings at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1967.
The following year he painted interiors, and then images of landscapes with architectonic constructions floating in the sky, exhibiting these and still-life paintings at the Academy. A Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant in 1970 enabled him to work towards a solo exhibition of 14 paintings at Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland in 1971, where his work was reviewed favourably as “unforgettable”. He won the Tokoroa Art Award’s first prize of $500, and Patrick Hutchings published an article on his work in the journal Islands, titled “Brent Wong: Surrealism in a Bland Landscape”.
By 1973 the constructions in the sky were starting to disappear from his paintings, and The Dowse Art Museum organised a large solo touring exhibition. Wong’s works entered the collections of the civic galleries in Auckland, Hamilton, Rotorua, Hawke’s Bay, Whanganui, Palmerston North, Lower Hutt, Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill, as well as the major corporate collections of the day, Fletcher, Caltex and the BNZ. Te Papa owns three major paintings from this early period, and Wong’s work has remained popular and highly sought after for five decades.
The winter 2025 edition of Webb's foremost art auction series, Works of Art offers an enviable selection of museum-quality pieces by some of the most seminal practitioners from New Zealand and beyond. Live auction is scheduled for Monday 28 July, 6.30pm in our Mount Eden Gallery.
Works of Art | Live Auction
Monday 28 July, 2025, 6.30pm
Auckland Launch Event
Tuesday 22 July, 6—8pm
Auckland Viewing Location
33a Normanby Road
Mount Eden, Auckland, 1023
Auckland Viewing Dates
Wednesday 23 July, 10am—5pm
Thursday 24 July, 10am—5pm
Friday 25 July, 10am—5pm
Saturday 26 July, 10am—4pm
Sunday 27 July, 10am—4pm
Auckland Viewing on Request
Monday 28 July, 10am—5pm
Auckland Live Auction
Monday 28 July, 6.30pm
Contact
Auckland
Emily Gardener
Director of Art
emily@webbs.co.nz
+64 22 595 5610
Wellington
Mark Hutchins-Pond
Senior Specialist, Art
mark@webbs.co.nz
+64 22 095 5610
Christchurch
Sean Duxfield
Specialist, Art
sean@webbs.co.nz
+64 21 053 6504