Martin Wong is recognized for his depictions of social, sexual, and political scenographies from the American 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Poetically weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time. Heavily influenced by the artist’s immediate surroundings, Wong’s practice merges the visual languages of Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti, carceral aesthetics, and sign language. His work offers a valuable insight into decisive periods of recent American history.

Edited by Krist Gruijthuijsen & Agustín Pérez Rubio. With contributions from Marci Kwon, Sofie Krogh Christensen, Agustín Pérez Rubio, David J. Getsy, Julie Ault, Heinz Peter Knes & Danh Vo.

Produced on the occasion of Willem Oorebeek’s exhibition at Galeire Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam, 12 January–13 February, 1991.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

The visionary paintings of Martin Wong, one of the unsung geniuses of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s, are collected here and examined in depth for the first time. Entirely self-taught, Wong created intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages-customised manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs-sometimes within a single painting.

The urban landscape of Loisaida, the Hispanic section of the Lower East Side where Wong lived, is the source of his imagery. Whatever the theme-the survival of a neighbourhood besieged by drugs and crime, homoerotic fantasies of men in uniform, the multiplicity of meaning in language, the kitsch and ornamentation of Chinatown USA-Wong’s work is visually startling and movingly autobiographical.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

A publication of preliminary drawings for a project at Culuurcentrum Vilvoorde.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition RADIATOR at 019, Ghent, 2 December, 2022–20 March, 2023.