Martin Wong is widely recognised for his extraordinary depictions of social, sexual and political scenographies from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time.

Heavily influenced by his immediate surroundings, Wong’s practice merges the visual languages of Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti, carceral aesthetics, and sign language as well as drawing heavily on the Latin American community he became so closely involved with. His work offers important insight into a decisive period of recent American history, as told through its changing urban landscapes and unfolding hidden desires.

Despite his deep engagement with the contemporary scene around him, Wong connected his work to a long tradition in art history. “Basically, I am a Chinese landscape painter,” he once said. “If you look at Chinese landscapes in the museum, they have writing in the sky. They write a poem in the sky and so do I.”

Wong was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Tate, London, UK; among others.