If all the world’s a stage, then Martin Wong, who died from AIDS at the age of 53 in 1999, was never a mere player: he was also set designer, director and costumer. His paintings resemble theatre sets, with textured brick buildings as backdrops, and are often filled with mythical creatures. The exhibition at Wrightwood 659 foregrounds his Chinatown canvases while also featuring the brick-filled New York cityscapes for which Wong is better known. The result is an intriguing dichotomy between the bustling Chinatown compositions, many completed in the early 1990s, and the more sombre urban nocturnes painted in the ’80s.
Wong was born in Portland and raised near San Francisco’s Chinatown, the child of a Chinese American mother and a Chinese Mexican American stepfather – a hybridity he embraced under the labels ‘Chino-Latino’ and ‘Chino Malo’, or the Bad Chinese, a nickname given to him by his Puerto Rican friends on New York’s Lower East Side. He chafed at being pigeonholed as a Chinese American artist; he never travelled to mainland China or spoke Chinese and was acutely aware that he walked a fine line between exposing Orientalism as a kind of performance and reinforcing the very stereotypes he was interrogating. ‘I refuse to not be Oriental,’ he declared at the opening of the original exhibition titled Chinatown USA in 1993 – a statement that captures both the defiance and the ambivalence at the heart of his work.
Wong seems to have loathed empty space. Videos of his apartment reveal that it was crammed with tchotchkes and collectibles, which became an artwork in their own right when Danh Vo displayed them at the Guggenheim in 2012 in the exhibition ‘I M U U R 2’. His Chinatown paintings are dense and hectic, with nowhere for the eye to settle. The monumental Chinese New Year Parade (1992–94) is anchored by the back of a little boy’s head – assumed to be Wong – gazing at a fantastical scene in which a golden dragon’s powerful jaws open over a crowd of cobalt-faced spirits and bejewelled gods and goddesses. Perhaps the composition owes something to Wong’s years designing sets, costumes and flyers for the Angels of Light Free Theater in San Francisco (a free-spirited performance collective) and to the influence of film-maker and performance artist Jack Smith.
The 1980s paintings of the Lower East Side have a more restrained palette and a stronger emotional pull, particularly Stanton Near Forsyth Street (1983). Wong stands on the far left of a nearly shadowless streetscape, with his collaborator and lover Miguel Piñero approaching from the right; text scrolling across the top reads ‘morning at the edge of time it never really mattered’. The same words are spelled out in a language of symbols Wong employed in many of his paintings, a personal system that sits somewhere between ASL and Buddhist mudras. Theatre comes to the fore in The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero: Cupcake and Paco (1984), which adapts a scene from Piñero’s prison play Short Eyes, casting a homoerotic jailhouse encounter as a Renaissance Annunciation – Paco kneeling before the new inmate Cupcake in the posture of the angel Gabriel. The brown skin of the figures contrasts with the silver-grey walls of the cell, and the entire painting is framed by steel bars and rivets – one of Wong’s signature moves was to create a frame from a texture within the painting, such as wood or bricks. The mock frames give the paintings the feel of folk or outsider art, a milieu in which Wong might have felt more comfortable than the commercial gallery world. (In 1984, after spying a liquidation sale sign saying, ‘Everything Must Go,’ Wong gave away a dozen paintings intended for a solo show at Semaphore Gallery – and threw out his wallet and keys for good measure.)
Wong’s life was shaped by loss. His father died of tuberculosis when he was three; Piñero, who lived with him in 1982 and 1983, died from cirrhosis in 1988. Yet he remained a deeply social person, rooted in community, whether through the Angels of Light Free Theater or a close-knit circle of graffiti artists on the Lower East Side. A film by fellow Lower East Side artist Charlie Ahearn, completed a year before Wong’s death, is included here. In one scene, Wong’s face brightens as he describes his plans to volunteer as a marshal in San Francisco’s Chinese New Year parade; moments later, the camera finds him in a safety vest, frail but purposeful, walking alongside the costumed procession. It is a quietly devastating image: Wong as he always seemed to be, simultaneously inside the spectacle and standing just outside it, taking it all in.
‘Martin Wong: Chinatown USA’ is at Wrightwood 659, Chicago until 18 July.