Martin Wong

Martin Wong was a Chinese-American painter of the late 20th century. His work has been described as a meticulous blend of social realism and visionary art styles. Wong's paintings often explored multiple ethnic and racial identities, exhibited cross-cultural elements, demonstrated multilingualism, and celebrated his queer sexuality. He exhibited for two decades at notable New York galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P.P.O.W., among others, before his death in San Francisco from an AIDS-related illness. P.P.O.W. continues to represent his estate.

Biography
Early years
Martin Wong was born in Portland, Oregon, on July 11, 1946, the only child of Florence (born Jan Yuet Ah) and Anthony Victor Wong. Florence, also born in Portland, was the daughter of a jewelry store owner from Guangzhou, and was raised in the Chinese city following her birth before returning to Oregon in 1940 to avoid the Japanese occupation. She moved to San Francisco, eventually securing work as a draftsperson at the Richmond Shipyards where she met Anthony, a Chinese-born draftsperson working in the facility. They married shortly before Wong was conceived, but Anthony was diagnosed with tuberculosis during the pregnancy. He died in 1950 in a sanatorium. After Anthony's death, Wong was placed in foster care until his mother was able to find new employment as a draftsperson with Bechtel. Wong was raised by his mother for the first several years of his life, living in San Francisco's Chinatown. In 1955, when Wong was nine years old, Florence married Benjamin Wong Fie, the co-owner of the apartment the family was renting. The family soon moved to a larger house between the Richmond and Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods after Benjamin was hired by Bechtel.

Demonstrating a proclivity for artistic expression at an early age, Wong started to paint at the age of 13. His mother was a strong supporter of his artistic inclinations and kept much of his early work. Wong took art classes through the De Young Museum's youth art program while attending George Washington High School. He first exhibited his art in 1961, showing a landscape painting at a gallery in North Beach. His mother also encouraged Wong to collect art and artifacts and he quickly amassed a large collection of primarily Asian art. He graduated high school in 1964. He continued his education at Humboldt State University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in Ceramics in 1968. Through college and for another 10 years, Wong traveled between Eureka and San Francisco practicing his artistic craft. During this time, Wong had an apartment in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and was active in the Bay Area art scene, including stints as a set designer for the performance art group The Angels of Light, an offshoot of The Cockettes. While involved with The Angels of Light, Wong participated in the emerging hippie movement and engaged in the period's climate of sexual freedom and experimentation with psychedelic drugs. By the late 70s, Wong made the decision to move to New York to pursue his career as an artist. According to Wong, his move to New York was precipitated by a friendly challenge:

I made ceramics and did drawings at arts fairs. I was known as the 'Human Instamatic.' It was US$7.50 for a portrait. My record was 27 fairs in one day. Friends said to me, 'If you're so good, why don't you go to New York?'

Career
In 1978 Wong moved to Manhattan, settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Largely self-taught, Wong's paintings ranged from gritty renderings of the decaying Lower East Side to playful depictions of New York's and San Francisco's Chinatowns, to Traffic Signs for the Hearing Impaired. In self-describing the subject matter of some of his paintings, Wong said: "Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live and the people are the people I know and see all the time."

Wong is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero. He met Piñero in 1982 on the opening night of the group exhibition Crime Show, held at ABC No Rio. Shortly after meeting, Piñero moved into Wong's apartment where he lived for the next year and a half. Wong credited Piñero with enabling him to feel more integrated into the Latino community. While they lived together, Wong produced a significant body of work that he eventually displayed in his exhibition Urban Landscapes at Barry Blinderman's Semaphore Gallery in 1984. Their collaborative paintings often combined Piñero's poetry or prose with Wong's painstaking cityscapes and stylized fingerspelling. Wong's Loisaida pieces and collaborations with Piñero formed part of the Nuyorican arts movement.

While living with Wong, Piñero commissioned him to document via painting a recently created graffiti work by the artist Little Ivan, which resulted in Wong beginning his Loisaida series. Wong's painting, Attorney Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero), centered on the graffiti work but also included a poem by Piñero, spelled out using hands in American Sign Language in the foreground of the image and written in English in the background against the sky. Wong also painted additional phrases on the frame of the painting using hands and sign language, painted to appear carved into the wood. Curator Sofie Krogh Christensen called this work a "eulogy to the multilingual community of the Lower East Side and its protagonists" for its use of multiple perspectives through text - the graffiti art of Little Ivan, Piñero's poem, and Wong's own sign language message on the frame - to memorialize the rapidly changing neighborhood.

Wong held a solo exhibition titled Chinatown Paintings at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993 that showcased his own memories, experiences and interpretations of the "mythical quality of Chinatown." Wong exemplified "a tourist idea, an outsider's view" of Chinatown that was prevalent for those distant from the reality of the city.

For a time in the 1980s, he made ends meet by buying underpriced antiquities at Christie's and selling them at Sotheby's for a fairer price. Wong amassed a sizable graffiti collection while living in New York and with the help of a Japanese investor, he co-founded with his friend Peter Broda the Museum of American Graffiti on Bond Street in the East Village in 1989. During this time, graffiti was a highly contested form of art and city officials had removed much of what had been in the New York City Subway system. In response, Wong set out to preserve what he considered to be "the last great art movement of the twentieth century." In 1994, following complications in his health, Wong donated his graffiti collection to the Museum of the City of New York. Among his collection were pieces from 1980s New York-based graffiti artists, including Rammellzee, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Lady Pink, and Lee Quiñones.

The catalog of a joint exhibition of Wong's work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Illinois State University Galleries was published by Rizzoli in 1998 in Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong.

Personal life
Wong was openly gay. In 1994 Wong was diagnosed with AIDS. With his health in decline following the diagnosis, he moved back to San Francisco. He died under the care of his parents in their San Francisco home at the age of 53 from an AIDS related illness on August 12, 1999. Miguel Piñero, Wong's former partner, died a decade earlier in 1988 from cirrhosis.

Wong's aunt, Eleanor "Nora" Wong, was an active participant in the San Francisco Chinese nightclub scene in the 1940s. She most notably had a host of duties, including principal singer, at Forbidden City.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2025