Once in a blue moon I encounter an artist that I fall in love with instantly. Martin Wong is such an artist. And I thank the people who have preserved his work, and memories of his life.
Frye Art Museum’s exhibit Twilight Child: Antonia Kuo and Martin Wong is like an appetizer, a way to draw you into the world of Martin Wong. Encountering his art, I find myself wanting to know more about him, wanting to see more of his work. His magnetic work and life has deeply inspired Antonia Kuo, a New York based artist who has selected and created work for this exhibit in which she responds and dialogues with Wong’s work.
The exhibit brings together the work of Antonia Kuo (born 1987) and Martin Wong (1946 – 1999) – two queer diasporic Chinese artists born more than forty years apart. Developed in close collaboration with Kuo, the exhibition features Wong’s rarely exhibited biomorphic clay sculptures from the 1960s and 70s, alongside selected paintings and archival materials from across his career. Kuo contributes recent photochemical paintings – including new works created in response to Wong’s poetry and sculptural objects made at her family’s Seattle-area industrial metal casting company.
Wong was an unstoppable creative force. He was a painter, photographer, sculptor, poet. The show borrows its title from Wong’s 1966 poem: ‘Mystic savage twilight child / vision ravaged running wild / pounding echoes down the rainslick night / resounding through the moulten light.’” The poem is inscribed on a clay tablet included in the show. Looking at Wong’s sketchbooks, you can feel his energy, his life force pulsating on the paper. His ceramics are “complex vortices of primordial energy” and his art imbues “all things with palpable vitality." In the video by Charlie Ahearn, you see Wong painting with two brushes, one in each hand. Wong was a very prolific artist; although he only lived 53 years, he created thousands of pieces.
For me, a powerful reason for Wong’s appeal is that his life and art are naked and open for all of us to savor. There is no lying, no filter. We are invited to take it all in, to feel his joys, his pains. His life and art are what he is, what he believes in. We experience his Puerto Rican neighborhood, his LGBTQ identity, his passion for nature, graffiti art, antiques, and old buildings, his advocacy for marginalized and disability rights.
Both Wong and Kuo, though separated by 40 years, live in an America in which they experience being the other, and the outsider. Whether you are conscious of them or not, strong societal forces tell you that you do not belong: you’re Asian; you don’t look like other people; you’re American born so you’re not Chinese; you don’t speak or write Chinese, so you’re not a real Chinese; you’re queer, so you’re dirty. Finding loving community seems to be a powerful undercurrent in the work of both artists. Wong finds community in New York’s East Village. He is also blessed with his mother who supports him as a person and an artist. Likewise, Kuo finds meaningful connection with her family, with her mother’s art, with access to and creative freedom in her family’s foundry.
Wong says he’s basically a Chinese landscape painter. Kuo says she is highly influenced by Chinese landscape painting, having grown up watching her mother paint. At first, I find it hard to visually relate Wong’s or Kuo’s work to Chinese landscape painting. I think of Chinese painting as more or less a spontaneous expression from mind to hand. I tend to focus on the brushwork, the lines, the use of different shades of ink, the empty spaces on the paper. None of that seems to be present in Wong’s or Kuo’s art.
Learning more, I realize that the similarity has more to do with process. Wong and Kuo create their work in the Chinese tradition of painting from memory: memory of a place, a feeling, or a moment. They all express feelings and sensations through formal elements: line, color, composition, positive and negative spaces. Wong depicts old and dilapidated buildings in New York. His sky is not blank paper as in Chinese painting, but often black paint on canvas as a night sky. The stories and mythologies in Chinese paintings are constellations in Wong’s sky. The poetry in Chinese painting becomes in Wong’s art, poetry in English, or ASL fingerspelling icons.
Kuo also creates for memory, often trying to capture feelings as well. In Behemoth, the work’s top half is reminiscent of a verdant landscape painting, an homage to her mother’s Chinese landscape paintings. The bottom half expresses a fond memory of a space: her family’s foundry’s mold-making room where Kuo has created many pieces.
Both of their work takes you on imaginary journeys, leaving space for your participation. Like dreams, Wong’s cacti are both images and symbols. They hint at endurance and perseverance. “Ars Longa Vita Brevis.” (“Life is short, but art endures.”) Kuo responds, “Martin was building a constantly expanding world through so many different lenses and that I’m striving to do the same thing in my own way.”
Both artists’ work appeal to the eye. Wong’s pieces are perhaps more accessible, as they are more representational, things we can recognize: buildings, cacti, people, biomorphic sculptures, or tablets that recall objects from an archaeological dig. Kuo’s works are more cerebral, more resistant to deciphering. They do allow us to imagine her, working deliberately, whether it is in the small graphite drawings that she must have spent countless hours pouring over, or manipulating chemicals over light sensitive paper, or forming sculpture using wax. The eye feast in lines, color, and form.
Both artists’ work seem to contain and emit frenetic energy and vibrations. If you watch the Ahearn video about Wong, you see how his mind seems to be active constantly, how he works on multiple paintings at the same time. Even Kuo’s white clay sculptures seem to want to escape their skins. And the surfaces seem to undulate. Both artists offer us so much to enjoy, like a buffet with enough yummy food that we can each find our pleasures.
Get a taste of Wong and Kuo’s interchange across time before the show ends on September 15, 2024.