3598, redesignated item 1365, relating to destruction of an energy facility, as item 1366. Often these city hellscapes are transformed by a concealed moment of intimacy – a couple embracing, hidden away, oblivious to the chaos around them.2003- Pub. The exhibition’s final part sees him exploring the energy of Chinatown and returning to Manhattan’s fortress-like tenements. Martin Wong, My Secret World, 1978-1981 (1984) Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and PPOW, New York © Martin Wong Foundation This is not the strongest section of the exhibition, with the prison guards too cartoony and the scenes too self-conscious. We see a brick Statue of Liberty, a vast eye-like wall and even – perhaps inevitably – a giant brick cock.Īfter falling in love with a bad-boy Latino writer called Miguel Piñero, Wong began a series of erotic prison paintings fuelled by Piñero’s salacious stories of life behind bars.

Bricks were the pixels of Wong’s urban cosmos, a colour palette composed of dark red clay and gold mortar. Many are filled with meticulously composed bricks, as though the artist were searching for order amidst the city’s trash-filled streets. Isolation haunts all Wong’s New York canvases. It is an extraordinary painting, flat and inscrutable but trembling with emotional longing. Here Wong’s bedroom – his art on the wall, his books and leather pouch with sharpened pencils – is seen from outside, looking in. In 1984, while living and working in a NYC hotel room, he painted My Secret World, 1978-1981. The son of American-born Chinese parents, he grew up amid the hippy euphoria of 1960s San Francisco before moving to New York City’s Lower East Side in the late 1970s, where he produced deeply poetic scenes of urban realism drawing on both his Chinese ancestry and his interest in graffiti.īricks were the pixels of Wong’s urban cosmos, a colour palette composed of dark red clay and gold mortar Surprisingly, this is the first extensive exhibition outside the US for Wong, who died in 1999 from AIDS-related illness.

Malicious mischief