Martin Wong

Published with Halsted A&A Foundation.

A visionary among contemporary artists from the 1970s to 1990s in the United States, Martin Wong embraced a multifaceted individualism as an Asian American queer painter and poet who freely explored and traversed ethnic and racial identities; challenged cultural, racial and ethnic stereotypes; and found creative sources through intersections of psychedelic theatre performance, calligraphy, poetry, graffiti and Asian art.
Chinatown USA investigates the liminal spaces the artist occupied and traces the development of Wong's work through his connection with the arts and culture of Asia. In particular, it highlights his explorations of Chinatowns in conjunction with counterculture communities (such as Puerto Rican poets and Black and Latino graffiti artists) in New York and San Francisco.
Martin Wong was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1946 and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. In 1978 he moved to New York and exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore and P·P·O·W, among others, before returning to San Francisco, where he died in 1999 from AIDS-related illness. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate, among others.

The paintings of Chinese American artist Martin Wong (1946–99) are celebrated for their affecting fusion of social realism, visual language, queerness and racial identity.
Footprints, Poems, and Leaves is a facsimile of his first poetry book, self-published in 1968. The volume collates dozens of poems written by Wong between 1966 and 1968, a tumultuous period in his life spent at the epicenter of the hippie movement in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Handwritten in what would become his signature calligraphic style, Wong’s poems presage the haunting sensibility of his later visual works. The thematic content of the poems ranges from surrealist descriptions of the urban subculture that surrounded him to downtrodden yet tender biographical entries. This new edition possesses a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a bony leaf.

This unforgettably named compact chapbook was first published by painter Martin Wong (1946–99) in 1977. Written in the early 1970s, the publication contains 13 chapters of handwritten micro-fictions filled with cringeworthy stories unfolding in San Francisco and beyond. The publication is populated with a cadre of colorful characters, some of whom are obscure underground figures such as George “Hibiscus” Harris from the Cockettes and Angels of Light, and others who are well known, such as Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and God. Written during his days working on the flyers and theatrical backdrops for the Angels of Light Free Theater and published just before his move to New York, these stories capture Wong’s playfulness and the absurdist, kaleidoscopic milieu of the moment in which they were written. Many of these stories appeared before the book’s publication in Wong’s now-iconic calligraphic scrolls.

Straddling East and West Coast postwar art cultures from the late 1960s until his death, Martin Wong (1946–99) painted narratives of queer existence, marginal communities and gentrification in a visual vocabulary that merged Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti and sign language. Wong took a thrillingly irreverent stance on sexual and political topics that were rarely given recognition within the art discourses of the time.
The most substantial volume on the artist yet published, and the result of exhaustive research, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief situates Wong’s exhilarating painterly explorations within his era and his complex cultural position, reproducing an abundance of paintings from across his career.