Despite the recent resurgence of figurative painting, few artists working today match the nuanced poetry and symbolic density of Wong’s singular vision. Wong first moved to New York in 1978, eventually settling on the Lower East Side, where he turned his attention exclusively to painting. From there, he set forth to depict urban life and through his diaristic approach, built a landscape of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, closed storefronts, fingerspelling and more. Describing his choice of subject matter, 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.” More than an artist, Wong was a “documenter of the constellation of social life” during his lifetime.

1981–2021 will be accompanied by a catalogue with essay by scholar, writer, and curator Rich Blint. As the Assistant Professor of Literary Studies and Director of the Program in Race and Ethnicity at The New School, Blint has a vocational dedication to the revolutionary potential of innovative humanities practice.

Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups, The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore and P·P·O·W, among others. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. Wong’s work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013 and traveled to the Amsterdam Museum in 2016. Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015 and traveled to the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017.

Aaron Gilbert (b. 1979) earned his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. He is a 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award recipient and was awarded the "Young American Painter of Distinction" by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010. Gilbert has exhibited paintings at Lyles and King, Deitch Projects, and Lulu Mexico City. His work is currently in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.