The first gallery of Martin Wong’s solo show at P·P·O·W is full of Popeyes painted as brickwork. Six cutouts stand in pairs along the floor, bulging forearms pumping on motorized pivots, showing off as much as cruising each other. Two larger, unmotorized versions of the cartoon character hang on the opposite wall, offering a closer look at their meticulous faux masonry. Wong painted these peacocking silhouettes between 1989 and 1997 on plywood cut by his close friend Peter Broda, who also built the mechanism that now sets them in motion for the first time, about twenty-seven years after Wong’s death.
Nearby, in an ornate gilded frame, hangs Untitled (Pop-Eye), ca. 1984, a small acrylic on canvas in which Popeye is upstaged by the more realistic—and more generously proportioned—erection beneath him. Look closer, and we notice that this Popeye is, in fact, a tattoo inked across the pubis of an anonymous man, such that the cartoon’s crotch and the man’s penis align in an erotically charged trompe l’oeil. The cartoon sailor redoubles his swagger on a stranger’s skin, drawing the body beneath him into Wong’s world—desire channeled through an icon.
Wong compared cartoons to the “demons and demigods” of Indian and Tibetan religious art, calling them “our mythology.” For him, the sacred could be reinvented through American pop—and Popeye came preloaded with a host of associations. The character’s anchor-tattooed forearm had long been comic shorthand for the sailor; by the 1980s, that sailor-body had passed through naval tattoo culture, Tom of Finland, and the sex aesthetics of Manhattan’s West Village leather bars and piers, becoming one of queer iconography’s most recognizable silhouettes. To render Popeye above a man’s groin, or build him out of bricks, was to claim the artist’s rightful place in a lineage that had shaped him without recognizing him.
The cutouts bring that claim home. Wong’s painted brickwork pulls Popeye into the walls of the Lower East Side tenements, fusing the cartoon body to the architecture of Chinatown. These walls wear the artist’s mythology like skin wears a tattoo. When the motor kicks in—each pair trading flexes, locked in a flamboyant, frontal, double-biceps pose—intimidation shades into seduction. That these cutouts move decades after Wong’s death, gives the whole scenario an extra charge: His mythology endures not through preservation alone but through renewed performance.
In the back gallery, the explicit eros recedes, but Wong’s layering technique holds. Untitled (Alfred E. Newman), ca. 1978–79, renders the MAD magazine mascot in warm ocher tones with a delicacy close to East Asian ink painting. It is framed in imitation wood grain and stamped with Chinese seals. Meanwhile, Untitled (Little Lulu and Tubby), ca. 1989, builds the comic book duo in the shape of a brick rampart decorated with Tibetan Citipati skulls beneath a black firmament with labeled constellations (Hydra, Gemini). Meanwhile, the immodestly titled The Most Beautiful Painting in the World, 1989, seats Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff inside Cézanne’s Les Joueurs de cartes (The Card Players, 1893–96),inscribing its own title in Chinese characters while hiding “Kilroy was here” faces across the brickwork. In each case, Wong routes cartoon bodies through art-historical traditions while delighting in their comic origins.
Wong described twins as “secretly two people from the waist up,” locating doubling inside the self rather than between original and copy. The Popeyes in the front gallery can be read as both twins and lovers; the back-gallery works fold Yankee comics into Asian and European pictorial conventions. For the artist, doubling was the argument, not the compromise. Heteronormative and queer coded, Asian and American, desiring and desired were latent forces that Wong channeled through the immediately accessible vector of the cartoon body. Wong built his practice on a premise he kept testing: A queer, Asian American artist could claim Popeye—a symbol for white working-class America—not as an ironic appropriation but as a personal mascot, in which the Lower East Side, the Sunday funnies, and tattooed flesh were indivisibly entwined.