Brent Wong was born in 1945 and spent the early part of his life in Wellington.
With the exception of what he describes as a brief and unsatisfactory period of tuition, Brent Wong is an entirely self-taught painter.

Painting for him has always been a process of discovery: both in terms of technique and of self. His early work, which was mostly in watercolour, was characterised by an interest in colour and composition, which he carried into his experimentation with abstract forms and other modes of painting, based on European models. Working in the studio from his memory and imagination of New Zealand landscapes, Wong developed the symbolic style for which he is now known, even painting in a surrealistic mode where he floats architectural forms over vast empty landscapes as if they were clouds.

Perhaps the only constant factor in Brent Wong's painting is the sky, and it plays an important role here in Clouds, Island, Dunes. As in this work, his clouds acquire a lofty permanence that is at odds with their true nature. The sky is a source of optimism: it receives painstaking and meticulous treatment, and in Wong’s later work replaced all other subject matter as his central concern.