File Note 146: Martin Wong

Malicious Mischief surveys more than one hundred artworks by Martin Wong, following the artist from world to world, lifetime to lifetime. In the 1960s, he was a San Francisco hippie (alias Smokey Watermelon), barefoot with hair below his waistline. He danced to rock music, dosed to liquid light shows, and carved his name in the cement of Haight-Ashbury. His clay sculptures from this period tracked the counterculture’s atavistic turn to the earthen and the talismanic. In the 1970s, Wong became a ‘country boy’ in a leather jacket and Stetson hat, painting provincial Humboldt Bay en plein air.1 He remade himself into a sidewalk portraitist – a ‘pencil for hire’ – and pitched for work in the dated register of the region’s motels and diners. In the 1980s, he was ‘El Chino Latino’ of New York, embedded in the Puerto Rican enclave of Loisaida and a scribe for its ‘Nuyorican’ poets.2 Paintings of crumbling tenements romanced the harsh realities of a neighbourhood neglected by city officials and left to a minoritarian underclass. In the 1990s, Wong turned back to his youth on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown, rendering its street life and architecture in lurid, day-tripper colours taken straight from the can.

Wong was consistent in the social and contextual orientation of his work. He was a painter of the neighbourhood, a village bard, the ‘Human Instamatic’. His art was an expression of, and a response to, the places in which he found himself. And yet, he was a trespasser. In California, he described himself as ‘the outsider wandering the edges’.3 In New York, he felt like a ‘tourist’.4 The impression was often mutual. Comrades in San Francisco’s acid drag performance troupe, the Angels of Light, sensed that he did not match their carnivalesque transgressions. Miguel Piñero, a Nuyorican poet and collaborator, couldn’t shake the feeling that Wong was an ‘investigative reporter’.5 And his Chinatown paintings earned him the ire of Asian American artists for their Orientalism, as if he were viewing his own culture with Western prejudice. But how could it be otherwise? Wong was too many things to fit into any one social world. His homosexuality aligned him with some circles and marked him off in others. His Chinese heritage was contiguous with, but distinct from, the Black and Brown communities that drew his interest. His upwardly mobile family diverged from the poverty he so often idealised.

He brought this starry-eyed storytelling with him from California, where it belonged to a strain of Narrative Imagism that combined personal mythology and political commentary, fantasy and reality. Indebted more to the dreamworlds of Surrealism than the avant-garde’s other more self-reflexive schools, Narrative Imagism exploited its distance from New York’s cerebral tendencies.9 When Wong migrated east, he snuck this idiom behind enemy lines. ‘Painting is forbidden’, he wrote in the mid-1980s:

The joys & pleasures of being a painter are almost identical to
those of being a serial killer:
The solitary quest
The thrill of the hunt
The compulsion of trying to complete an imaginary set
To live totally in the imagination
The suspense
The urgency
And finally the uncontrollable spasms at the ultimate moment
between life and death when the veil of time is suddenly ripped
asunder
In the end painting is also similar to murder in that when the thrill
is finally gone, all you have left is a mess and a disposal problem. 10

Even as the artist lived in a world of his own making, he tried to speak in the voices of those around him. His unusual emphasis on the written word brings forward the pleas and threats of Pedro Rodriguez and the oratory of Miguel Piñero in his poem King Heroin. He borrows Spanish and Chinese texts even though he could not read them fluently. Fingerspelling from American Sign Language is also conspicuous. Here, too, he was a trespasser, not only illiterate in the language but also willing to misuse it. Words are spelled out with individual characters in a way that does not privilege the hearing-impaired (who read like anybody else). However, Wong might have been allegorising the communication of difference. These paintings impose a moment of bodily encounter that interrupts assimilation. They stop us from making another’s language so easily our own and compel us to linger in the space of not-quite-understanding. In concealing denotation, the artist reveals something else – not language’s functionality, but what Roland Barthes once described as ‘meaning in its potential voluptuousness’.15

Wong lets the body shape the text. Transcriptions of Nuyorican poetry capture the expressivity of a voice in recital. Stanzas expand and contract with cadence; they bend upwards and downwards like pitch. The artist’s poetry scrolls foreground the locomotion of the calligrapher, strokes pushing and pulling in different directions. And in the graffiti he collected, monikers contort through the elaborate twists of the arm and hand – what graffiti mystic Rammellzee called ‘remanipulation by and from energy through the body’.16 When Wong said that his fingerspelling paintings ‘speak the unhearable and show the invisible’, perhaps this is what he meant.17 To paint in this way gives form to a voice that cannot be heard, a body that cannot be seen.

The work of Martin Wong is a curious play of relation. It pries open the prospect of connection in moments of contrast. His ability to capture this contradiction is predicated, in part, on the way he never fully identified with the worlds in which he was nonetheless embedded. He could slip from one to another, casting and recasting himself as part-participant and part-observer, stealing bits of paradise.

One of the earliest pieces in Malicious Mischief is a sculpture of a mischievous little dog, his head snapped back in laughter. The same dog appears on the cover of his poetry book, Footprints Poems + Leaves, 1968, and in the flier for his solo exhibition, Dream Fungus, 1970. It assumes the air of an avatar. Wong called it Rin Tin Tin after a German Shepherd from American movies, but its kinked ears and wiry frame resemble another character: Wile E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, 1930-1969. Such cartoons were for the artist a ‘mythology’ not unlike the ‘demons and demigods’ found in various religions.18 And in the myths of many Native communities on the West Coast of North America, the coyote is wily indeed. He is known as the trickster, who uses his cunning to enter the worlds of other animals. He collects pine nuts like a squirrel and builds a dam like a beaver. He dons the skins of a bear. Coyote the trickster is a boundary crosser who enters the worlds of others and – through actions both wise and foolish – reveals unspoken codes. Wong stepped into different communities in this way, troubling and illuminating their logic. In so doing, he makes us consider how differences might belong together.