The Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington recently presented Twilight Child: Antonia Kuo and Martin Wong, an exhibition featuring the works of two queer diasporic Chinese artists who were born just over 40 years apart. The show ran from June 15 - September 15, 2024, and was organised by Amanda Donnan, former Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Frye Art Museum, and Georgia Erger, Curator, Frye Art Museum.
The exhibition was a cross-generational consideration of Kuo (b. 1987) and Wong’s (1946 - 1999) practices, and was developed in close collaboration with Kuo. Kuo is an interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, drawing, photography, sculptural art, printmaking and film. She chose to include recent photochemical paintings in the show, including a new work inspired by Wong’s poetry, as well as various sculptural objects. Wong was best known for his paintings, which blended realism, graffiti art, and other styles he came in contact with in San Francisco and then New York. Alongside his paintings, the art exhibition included archival materials, poetry, and rarely exhibited biomorphic clay sculptures that resemble prehistoric marine life, such as Trilobites, which went extinct over 250 million years ago.
Twilight Child illuminated how both artists interweave influences from their Chinese heritage into their practice. In a think piece, Dr. Margo Machida, Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies, University of Connecticut, revisits a 1989 conversation with Wong, noting that the artist found inspiration in paintings that were part of the 19th century Chinese export trade during a visit to Guangzhou, where his family had roots. Wong maintained that he was in essence a Chinese landscape painter. Kuo was also inspired by Chinese landscape paintings (as well as calligraphy), having watched her mother create traditional art as a child. While the works of neither may immediately seem to reference landscape painting, Fred Wong, writing for the International Examiner, explains that the technique rather than the result is key to understanding the relationship between the practices of these artists; Chinese landscape paintings are traditionally created from memory, with the aim of capturing a feeling rather than conveying precise topographic details. Both Wong and Kuo have worked similarly.
Kuo and Wong both brought a sense of fantasy into the works shown at the art museum. To quote Kuo from the exhibition brochure, “I’m very aware that 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.” Wong integrated photography, performance art and his alienesque sculptural works along with several visual styles beyond traditional Chinese art to create a body of work that is simply visionary. Kuo too presented an interplay between ordered and chaotic elements, best evinced through her photochemical paintings.
Frye Art Museum’s offering of queer art treated audiences to two highly original artistic practices. Both Wong and Kuo have created art that resists easy labels, instead proposing original visual languages drawing on personal experience, thus gesturing to their individuality. Perhaps this is where the queerness of their work lies, in how they embrace varied cultural elements and influences.