Martin Wong

Persuit (El Que Gane Pierde - He Who Wins Looses)

Painted while living in New York's Lower East Side, works such as Persuit (El Que Gane Pierde - He Who Wins Looses) reflect the artist's affinity for the real and the imagined. Aged brick buildings and maps of the night sky often occupy Martin Wong's nocturnes. Obsessive detail of chain-link gates and illuminated windows meet sidewalk drama. A runaway figure darts to the street corner while looking back at their surroundings. A faux wood frame encases the scene, frozen in place by a night sky of charted stars.

Wong remarked, “Basically I am a Chinese landscape painter. If you look at the Chinese landscapes in the museum they have writing in the sky. They write a poem in the sky and so do I.”

The painted details of Wong’s canvases rely on language and visual narrative. As a gay Chinese-American in a majority Spanish-speaking neighborhood, he spent much of his time living as an outsider. Wong used alternative systems of expression– American Sign Language, graffiti, and poetry – to communicate his surroundings in his works as a response to his background as a self-taught artist. Joined by constellations in the sky, his landscapes exist as memories of a distant time and place.