One of the twelve paintings which comprised the artist's first solo exhibition held at the Rothman's Cultural Centre in Wellington in August 1969, Establishment is a classic Brent Wong composition. The characteristic combination of blue sky, sea, dry grassed hills, fluffy white clouds and ghostly white architectural elements mark the work as dating from the first decade of his exhibiting career. Four of the paintings from Wong's first solo exhibition were reproduced in the November 1969 issue of Ascent: A Journal of the Arts in New Zealand, edited by Leo Bensemann and Barbara Brooke for the Caxton Press in Christchurch, the city where he had been encouraged by Rita Angus to show as part of The Group at the Canterbury Society of Arts. The Hocken Library bought a painting in May 1969, and the esteemed art critic and writer, Patrick Hutchings acquired this work to take back with him to Australia. At just 24 years of age, Brent Wong the rising star of his generation.

In a footnote to his article Brent Wong: Surrealism in a Bland Landscape published in the second issue of Islands in 1972, Professor Hutchings remembers that when he visited Wong's studio in January 1969, Establishment (which was named The Landing at that stage) was already underway. It is revealing that the work was once titled differently, since the jumble of architectural elements do indeed look like they have crash landed and tumbled apart. It is easy to see why Wong was described as a surrealist (a term he rejected): the chimney here seems to have taken root in the hillside separately from the other elements, the cylinder on top to disperse the smoke oriented like a telescope, pointing out of the picture frame. Balancing it is a rectangular plinth with a circular opening, also solidly anchored, while volutes, cornices and architraves topple off in all directions. Establishment is similar to the Auckland Art Gallery's Abandoned Settlement (1969) purchased in 1970, although there is still a floating shape in the sky above the ruins in that painting.

Rather than lamenting the loss of architectural heritage like John Radford's Tip (1998) in Western Park, Ponsonby, Wong described his forms as constructions although they suggest castles in the air; structures that were never built. In his scholarly article on Young Contemporary New Zealand Realists for Art International, published in Zürich in 1973, Professor Hutchings describes them as concretising a regret for what was never there: a knot of details, an enigmatic and impossible folly, floating in the air above the carefully observed and beautifully recorded landscape…It is precisely that absence from New Zealand's beautiful hills and plains of great, noble monumental buildings, that these curious follies comment upon.

Wong's constructions are based on the pencil doodles and drawings of Wellington's Victorian and Edwardian architecture that filled the four sketchbooks he carried with him at this time. Reproduced in the catalogue to the survey exhibition which Jim Barr mounted at the Dowse in 1978 and toured to twelve galleries nationally, Wong's preliminary sketches are highly architectonic and of their time and place. They are reminiscent of architect Ian Athfield's white-plastered house and office in Khandallah which began sprouting up in the 1960s, as well as Roger Walker's Link Building on the Wellington waterfront, and the chunky, clunky geometric sculptures of fellow Chinese-Kiwi artist, Guy Ngan (1926-2017) who was director of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts between 1976 and 1986 where Wong frequently exhibited.

Essay by - Linda Tyler