Has there ever been a more impassioned, tender painter of the humble red brick than Martin Wong?
Chicagoans can hardly be blamed for not knowing — the city has never hosted an exhibition devoted to Wong, who died at the age of 53 in 1999 from AIDS. Few and far between are the local collections that contain his paintings; the MCA has none and the Art Institute’s stunner is currently off view. All the more reason not to miss “Martin Wong: Chinatown USA,” on view at Wrightwood 659 and featuring his impasto love letters to the tenements of the Lower East Side and the Chinatown of bygone San Francisco, plenty of revelatory memorabilia, and a glimpse at one of the most essential collections of graffiti art, which Wong began assembling in the early 1980s in New York City.
The show opens with a series of early, crusty, slightly scary ceramics and a video portrait, directed by Charlie Ahearn of “Wild Style” fame. The video, completed in 1998, sets just the right tone for approaching Wong’s oeuvre. He’s filmed in New York in his Lower East Side apartment, crammed full of Chinese antiquities, walls of graffiti, and stacks of his own paintings, which he works on enthusiastically, and very shirtless, for the camera. Footage appears of a well-attended opening at the downtown Manhattan gallery P.P.O.W. for those same canvases, intercut with clips of old Peking Opera films. Dressed in a cowboy shirt, he celebrates the Lunar New Year at a Chinatown parade. He is hospitalized, he is diagnosed with AIDS, he has moved back to his parents’ house in San Francisco, and is in bed being administered medical treatment by his mother. For the final scene, he sings karaoke at a New Year’s Eve party, surrounded by friends and family.
What all this exuberance and cultural syncretism and love of urbanity looks like when transmuted into art is manifold, and “Chinatown USA” proceeds as a series of chapters exploring the myriad possibilities. The title refers to one such, a set of paintings Wong worked on for years but held off from exhibiting until 1993, not wanting to play to stereotype. Flat, gold-trimmed, and full of slinky women in cheongsams, these mostly pay tribute to the booming San Francisco Chinatown of the 1920s. Wong, who was raised in the area by his Chinese American mother and Chinese Mexican American stepfather, never traveled to China and never learned the language; Chinatown was a place where he couldn’t read the signs but still belonged. “Chinese New Year’s Parade” expresses that position from the point of view of his 7-year-old self, a tiny boy fabulously dwarfed by a gargantuan dragon’s head, a swarm of blue devils, and a trio of scary green-fleshed Daomadan. Other paintings amalgamate Wong’s cultural inheritance through pop art (a giant oyster sauce bottle), historical syncretism (a stylistically fascinating riverboat scene with a cameo by Mark Twain, known for speaking out against racist U.S. policies toward China and Chinese immigrants), and personal tribute (portraits of his parents as proprietors of a Chinese laundry and as nude art-deco lovers).
During his lifetime and still today, Wong is best known for his gritty, gorgeous paintings of New York City, where he moved in 1978, eventually settling in a tenement at the corner of Rivington and Stanton on the Lower East Side. A coup of the Wrightwood exhibition is its decision to display both sides of “Untitled (Silver Storefront),” an enormous painting completed in 1985 that joins together Wong’s Chinatown and Lower East Side works. The verso depicts a fictional Chinatown storefront, home to an art school and a gallery, where a demon-hunter paints pictures identical to Wong’s. The recto portrays, in exactingly realistic detail, a locked and beat-up steel rolldown gate, as only the Lower East Side knows them, perforated with 15 black holes begging to be poked through. If there’s a more sensuous security grate out there, I haven’t seen it.
Likewise, Wong’s bricks are beyond compare in the attention lavished on each individual building block. They suffuse his portraits of the Loisaida with ecstatic devotion. According to the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné, a project of the foundation his mother set up after her son died, Wong created nearly 200 brick paintings during his lifetime. These include brick Statues of Liberty, non-brick paintings encased in frames painted to look like bricks, actual television sets with bricked-up screens, dozens of tondos, and quite a lot of brick penises (clearly Wong could not resist a good rhyme). The selection on view at Wrightwood includes the magnificent “Heaven,” a giant all-brick tondo with a small black hole at the center, like an LP, or a glory hole, or a bi, an ancient Chinese artifact symbolic of cosmic harmony. The painting hangs spectacularly in the museum’s multistory atrium, itself a cathedral to Chicago firebrick.
Most of the brick paintings at Wrightwood are Loisaida landscapes, peopled with passionate characters like kissing firemen, airborne skateboarders and Miguel Piñero, a Puerto Rican poet, playwright and ex-convict who was Wong’s lover in the early ’80s. An unabashedly romantic portrait of Piñero, framed with the words of his lyrical paean to the neighborhood, pulses with the urban heat of bricks: a vista of shadowy brick tenements, a moon composed of glowing bricks, a steamy red and black sky.
It’s almost always nighttime in Wong’s paintings of the Lower East Side, and he often fills those dark skies with golden constellations and his own poems. Wong related the poems to the history of Chinese landscape painting, which traditionally feature calligraphic inscriptions, but he invented his own system of aestheticized script inspired by an American Sign Language fingerspelling card bought from a subway seller in 1980. What looks indecipherable is not really; in any case, standard lettering appears in the stylized cufflinks beneath each hand. A section of the exhibition devoted to his all-text works includes the stunning “Silence: Blue Voice,” all seven ultramarine feet of it filled with Wong’s strange glowing hieroglyphs.
Earlier poem-scrolls appear here, too, written in a style that foreshadows the graffiti Wong would come to love decades later. How could he not? Graffiti contained nearly everything: urbanity, fieriness, walls, glyphs. For a short time in 1989, Wong’s sizable collection, acquired directly from Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, Sharp and other downtown street artists he’d befriended, became the Museum of Graffiti. When it folded, everything got jammed into his apartment; when he died, it became part of the Museum of the City of New York. A mini tribute fills one of Wrightwood’s smaller galleries, and it infuses the entire show with its scrappy, ravenous, perennially youthful sensibility.
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A new museum to join Wrightwood 659
Why hasn’t there been a Wong show in Chicago until now? One answer to that question is that Wrightwood 659 has only been around since 2018, and as the city’s premiere space dedicated to art addressing issues facing LGBTQ+ communities, with a sideline in Asian art and architecture, it fills a gap sometimes left by other institutions. But it fills them at the behest of a notoriously opaque establishment, privately funded by the philanthropist next door, businessman Fred Eychaner.
His most recent project has been to clear another lot he owns on the street and start construction on a new, 10,000-square-foot, three-story exhibition space designed by Tadao Ando, who also designed Wrightwood 659. Few other details have been made available, but if Wrightwood 659 is anything to go on, it’s sure to be meticulous, elite and whatever the owner wants it to be.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
Update: This story has been changed to reflect that Fred Eychaner had previously owned the site now under construction.
If you go
“Martin Wong: Chinatown USA” is on view through July 18 at Wrightwood 659, 659 Wrightwood Ave., wrightwood659.org