The Chinese-American’s queer, multilingual painting’s used to be difficult to decode. But as a new retrospective of his politically prophetic work becomes a surprise summer hit, has his time finally come?
here’s a painting on show at the new Martin Wong retrospective that demands closer inspection. At first, the 1988 piece entitled Heaven depicts a circular wall, notable for the immaculate detailing on the brickwork. But gaze closer and you see a small black hole in the middle of the painting, a detail that gives the work a loaded queer subtext.Photograph: © Martin Wong Foundation
It’s taken a long time for people to be able to know Wong and his work. According to Clark it was the artists around him in New York, in particular the graffiti art community with which he was close, who were “holding the torch” prior to 2016, when the Bronx Museumthat began to shine a light on Wong’s art. Malicious Mischief, the current retrospective showing
Why has it taken people so long to catch up? Clark believes the kind of work Wong was making, both in terms of the issues and the aesthetics, was out of favour during his lifetime . “Figurative painting and identity politics was at the bottom of the agenda in a lot of ways,” says Clark. Clark says that Wong was “an outsider in all of the communities that he was in,” whether that was hippies and queer performance groups in San Francisco, or the Puerto Rican community that he was involved with once he moved to the east coast.
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