Martin Wong
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
25 February – 14 May
Martin Wong, a queer Chinese American with ranchero flair, was a dynamo of the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s. His trippy sense of urbanism informed portrayals of the soaring tenements and tumbling rubble of New York’s down-and-out Lower East Side, haunted by heroin, shadowed by HIV. He painted firemen kissing in front of a smouldering high-rise (Big Heat, 1986) and a sobbing Statue of Liberty made of bricks (Untitled [Statue of Liberty], 1990). But the lowly Untitled (Green Storefront) (1985) is one of his most intensely psychedelic works. – Travis Diehl