Estate of Martin Wong
P·P·O·W is pleased to present The Midnight Sea, A Little Dash of LSD, a two-person exhibition featuring works on paper by the late Chinese-American artist Martin Wong and the Toronto-based artist Paul P. Selected by P., the works on view plumb each artists’ respective archive, revealing an intergenerational dialogue unfolding through the compositions of two queer makers as their creative interests evolved from young adulthood to mid-career maturity.
Martin Wong
Untitled (Tom Mueller in profile), 1970
pencil on paper
12 x 9 1/4 x 1/2 in.
30.48 x 23.5 x 1.27 cm
While largely created decades apart, the drawings, prints, and poems included in the exhibition evince a shared desire to catalogue and celebrate the world at-hand with stylistic flourish. For Wong, this proclivity emerged during his post-college years living in Eureka, California. A self-described ‘human instamatic’—a labeling he coined to define his skillful street portraits—Wong sought to visually preserve the denizens and landscapes of the coastal town as gentrification encroached during the mid-1970s, an artistic decision that carried over to the artist’s iconic paintings of New York’s Loisaida from the 1980s. From friends and lovers to trees and bridges, Wong captured his surroundings with a visual language indebted in equal parts to West coast psychedelia, Old Master techniques, and Asian art history.
Paul P.
Untitled, 2001
colored pencil on paper
8 1/2 x 11 ins.
21.5 x 28 cm
For P., who came of age in the 1990s, his self-awareness was largely shaped by the effects of the AIDS epidemic. In response to a decimated community, he embarked on a series of pencil-on-paper head-and-shoulder portraits of erotic models sourced from gay magazines discovered in the back of adult bookstores. The figures, all originating from a period between the 1960s to 80s, represent a homosexual timeline bookended by gay liberation and the early days of the AIDS crisis. Through this series, P. sought to honor these mostly anonymous young men and their unknown fates. And while P.’s source material for this body of work is derived from printed images, like Wong, he would go on to incorporate direct observation into his practice, exalting the quotidian through the drawn medium and a queer coded lens.
Martin Wong
I Love You, c. 1972
pencil on paper
11 x 8 1/2 ins.
27.9 x 21.6 cm
The similarity between Wong and P. continues with each artist’s subject matter. Toggling between low/high cultural allusion, images of palm trees, coastal landscapes, and cartoonish fauna sit alongside references to Baroque statuary, Romantic painting, and classical antiquity. In this way, P.’s choice of works both for himself and Wong creates a lineage of shared means and ends: analogous subjects populate the artists’ respective visual worlds, even while the line, gesture, and style remain distinctly individual.
Martin Wong (b. 1946 Portland, OR; d. 1999 San Francisco, CA) has work in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. In late 2022, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, the first touring retrospective of Wong’s work in Europe, debuted at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, before travelling to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and the Camden Art Centre in London. Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez-Rubio, the final leg of the exhibition is currently on display at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam until April 2024.
Paul P. (b. 1977) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, among others. Solo exhibitions include: Amors et Mors, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada (2023); Early Skirmishes, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2022); Vespertilians, Maureen Paley, London, UK (2022); Gamboling Green, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada (2020); Slim Volume, Queer Thoughts, New York, NY (2019); Civilization (inverted), Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada (2017); Dry Neptune, Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy (2011); and Dusks, Lamplights, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2007). Group exhibitions include: Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023); Shadows Fall Down, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Front International Cleveland Triennial, Cleveland, OH (2018); 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY (2014); and Compass in Hand, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2009).This summer, KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin will mount a major two-person exhibition of the work of Paul P. and Jimmy DeSana.
Martin Wong
I Love You, c. 1972
pencil on paper
11 x 8 1/2 ins.
27.9 x 21.6 cm
Martin Wong
Untitled (To Virginia from Martin), 1975
stamped
pencil on paper
15 x 12 x 1 1/4 in.
38.1 x 30.48 x 3.18 cm
Martin Wong
Untitled (Tom Mueller in profile), 1970
pencil on paper
12 x 9 1/4 x 1/2 in.
30.48 x 23.5 x 1.27 cm
Paul P.
Untitled, 2010
lithograph
12 x 8 1/4 ins.
30.5 x 21 cm
Paul P.
Untitled, 2001
colored pencil on paper
8 1/2 x 11 ins.
21.5 x 28 cm
Paul P.
Untitled (thorn puller), 2018
ink on paper
9 x 5 1/2 ins.
22.9 x 14 cm
Please join P·P·O·W, Primary Information, and The Poetry Project in celebrating the publication of Martin Wong’s Footprints, Poems, and Leaves and Das Puke Book! Featuring readings by John Ahearn, Wo Chan, Lydia Cortés, Christopher “Daze” Ellis, Antonia Kuo, Eugene Lim, and Emily Zhou!
