Riffing off the title, this volume includes an interview with Carolyn Lazard—an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation—by Catherine Damman, plus a feature on New York-based contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, and contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler. Edited with Kathrin Bentele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung. Including the work of Lutz Bacher, stanley brouwn, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Hanne Darboven, Jef Geys, Tishan Hsu, Pope L., Louise Lawler, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Lee Lozano, Henrik Olesen, Sarah Rapson, Margaret Raspé, Ketty La Rocca, Sturtevant, Martin Wong and Octavia E. Butler.
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.
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.
Edited by Julie Ault, Heinz Peter Knes, Danh Vo, Christopher Müller & Daniel Buchholz.
This catalogue documents the collection of the artist Martin Wong. In numerous colour illustrations, photographs that Heinz Peter Knes took together with Danh Vo, the book depicts the interiors of the Wong Fie family residency in San Francisco filled with paintings, sculptures, and multifaceted objects from very specific and diverse fields of interest such as asian antiques and americana that Martin Wong followed and collected together with his parents throughout is life.
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.
More information on Martin Wong can be found here.
Octopus Notes is a biannual journal that publishes critical essays, academic writings, interviews and artists’ projects.The ninth issue brings together contributions by Ana Baliza, Tenzing Barshee, Tomas Cunha Ferreira, Alice Dusapin, Alexandre Estrela, Wade Guyton, Pati Hill, Merlin James, Justin Jaeckle, JGL, Greer Lankton, Douna Lim, Mark Melnicove, Paul Monroe, Adrian Morris, Lil Picard, Carlo Pittore, Bern Porter, Seth Price, Zoé Stillpass, Théo Robine-Langlois, Anne Turyn, Camille Vivier, Erika Vogt, Kelley Walker, and Martin Wrong.