Martin Wong

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Martin Wong
Born July 11, 1946(1946-07-11)
Portland, Oregon
Died October 12, 1999 (aged 53)
Nationality Chinese
Field Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Printmaking, Ceramics


Martin Wong (July 11, 1946 – August 12, 1999) was a 20th century American painter. Wong was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Through college and for another 10 years he was active in the Bay Area art scene, including stints as a set designer for the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light. He was openly gay.[1]


In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. 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 $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?'[2]

 „

Wong's mature work ranged from gritty, heartfelt renderings of the decaying Lower East Side, to playful, almost kitschy depictions of New York's and San Francisco's Chinatowns, to "traffic signs for the hearing impaired". He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero, paintings that often combined Piñero's poetry or prose with Wong's painstaking cityscapes and stylized fingerspelling.

Wong was a collector and connoisseur of everything from graffiti to Asian antiquities. For a time in the 1980's he made ends meet by buying underpriced antiquities at Christie's and selling them at Sotheby's for a fairer price.[2] His graffiti collection grew to be perhaps the largest in the world; in 1993 he donated it to the Museum of the City of New York.

Once nearly overlooked by the art establishment, Wong was acknowledged in his New York Times obituary as an artist "whose meticulous visionary realism is among the lasting legacies of New York's East Village art scene of the 1980's".[3] Critical esteem has sustained since his death, and Wong's works can be found in collections worldwide, including the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the de Young Museum and the cities of New York and San Francisco. The Martin Wong Papers reside at the Fales Library, New York University, and include among other things sketchbooks, correspondence, biographical documents, videocassette recordings, photos, graffiti-related materials, and parts of Wong's personal library.

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, under the title Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong.

Two of Martin Wong's paintings are in the collection of the Whitney Museum in New York City.

One of his paintings is in the collection of the state of California and displayed permanently at the California State Building in San Francisco.


[edit] References

  1. ^ Mann, Richard G (July 4, 2007), “Wong, Martin”, glbtq.com, <http://www.glbtq.com/arts/wong_m.html>. Retrieved on 2007-10-15 
  2. ^ a b "The Bricklayer's Art", by Guy Trebay, May 26, 1998, The Village Voice
  3. ^ "Martin Wong Is Dead at 53; A Painter of Poetic Realism", by Roberta Smith, August 18, 1999, New York Times

[edit] External links