Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art is hosting a retrospective of the works of painter Martin Wong, entitled “Malicious Mischief”. The exhibition features over 100 of Wong’s artworks, including paintings, ceramics, reliefs, poems, theater artifacts, and graphics, and will run until the 18th of June.
The title of the exhibition, “Malicious Mischief”, refers to a pair of paintings depicting prison officers and the crime of willfully damaging another person’s property. It also summarises the fickle workings of fate in regard to Wong’s practice and reputation. Wong died in 1999 at the age of 53 from an HIV/AIDS-related illness. At the time of his death, his art was only just beginning to receive wider recognition, thanks in part to a 1998 retrospective at the New Museum in New York. After his death, his body of work disappeared from view, until the art world developed an archival interest in square-peg intersectional figures like Wong. His work received another substantive showing in a 2016 retrospective at the Bronx Museum. Wong was a queer, Chinese American hippie-mystic-fantasist-social-critic and the retrospective at KW Institute for Contemporary Art shows European audiences the breadth of his works.
The exhibition takes viewers back to Wong’s student days in Oakland at the beginning of the 1970s, as he embraced West Coast counterculture whilst also trying not to erase his heritage. His long paper scrolls covered in Beat-esque prose poetry, the jazzy Zap Comix-like prints he designed to advertise San Francisco drag-performance act The Cockettes, and his outsider nature and gravitation to local communities are all evident in the show. After moving to Humboldt County in 1973, Wong began painting local bars, crab fishermen, and compositional stews of non-Western lore and racial stereotyping like Tibetan Porky (1975-78), a watermelon-eating, many-eyed deity perched atop a crab-like creature and surrounded by skulls.
In 1978, Wong moved to the working-class, mainly Puerto Rican neighborhood known as Loisaida in downtown New York, and was befriending (and collected the work of) graffiti artists. His paintings began focusing on tightly painted architectural facades, some with bricked-up windows. These works reflect the decaying area he lived in, which was at once prey to gentrifiers and home to immigrant communities living lives that were mostly unseen. The paintings of shuttered storefronts he made in the mid-to-late 1980s are startlingly economical evocations of hiddenness and displacement expressed through grimy geometry.
At the same time, Wong was also beginning a long series of paintings set inside New York prisons, which had disproportionately high numbers of prisoners of color. These paintings soon traded melancholic images of sleeping prisoners in stacked bunks for beefcake fantasies of hunky inmates, sexualizations of corrections officers, and the power-inverting cop-taunting scenario of 1994’s Come Over Here Rockface (“and suck my dick,” the text beside a shirtless prisoner clarifies). Wong’s art asserts that, on canvas at least, he was free and able to sexualize New York’s firemen and policemen. By 1990, he’d begun folding his long-standing fascinations together in near-hallucinatory ways.
Towards the end of his life, Wong began reconsidering and plasticizing his heritage, creating a kind of pantheon-like Chinatown of the mind. The exhibition features Wong’s final movement, which includes paintings such as See Bruce Lee in the Afterworld (1991), with the martial arts master striking Wong’s increasing interest in his cultural roots. The picture is set against a blue background and features a jumble of iconic images, including the profile of Bruce Lee, the dragon symbol, and Chinese characters. The painting showcases Wong’s talent for integrating his interests and exploring themes that had personal significance to him.
As his career progressed, Wong increasingly focused on depicting Chinese American culture, and his later works often incorporated elements of traditional Chinese art. This shift is evident in pieces like Martin Wong’s Bedroom (1993), which features a bedroom filled with Chinese artifacts, and Dragon Lady (1995), which showcases a woman in a cheongsam dress against a background of Chinese-style clouds. Wong’s later works are a testament to his artistic skill and willingness to explore his identity as a Chinese American.
The “Malicious Mischief” retrospective at KW in Berlin is a powerful tribute to Wong’s life and career. The exhibition highlights the many themes and styles that Wong explored over the years, from his early days as a poet and performer in San Francisco to his later years as a celebrated painter in New York. The retrospective is an opportunity for European audiences to experience Wong’s unique artistic vision and to appreciate his contribution to the world of contemporary art.
Wong’s legacy continues to resonate with artists and audiences today. His work, which explored themes of identity, community, and marginalization, speaks to the struggles and experiences of many people who feel like outsiders in contemporary society. Wong’s art is a reminder that there is beauty and power in difference and that the most compelling works of art are often those that challenge our assumptions and expand our understanding of the world.