Martin Wong (; July 11, 1946 – August 12, 1999) 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.
Biography
Early years
Martin Wong was born in Portland, Oregon on July 11, 1946. An only child, Wong was raised by his parents Benjamin and Florence Wong Fie in the Chinatown district of San Francisco. 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 attended George Washington High School, graduating 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:
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.
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.
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.