Artwork and Collections by Martin Wong - Essay Example

Martin Wong Martin Wong was a painter in the United s whose works premiered in the late 20th Century. The painter was born on 11 July 1946 in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco’s district of Chinatown in California. Wong studied ceramics at Humboldt State University and graduated in 1968. Throughout college and ten years after graduating, Wong was an active member of San Francisco Bay Area scene if art. These art scenes included stints as a set of designer for performed art groups Angels of the Light and The Cockettes. The painter moved to Manhattan in 1978 and eventually settled in the lower East Side. He focused his attention completely to painting. His move to New York came as a friendly challenge. He did drawings and made ceramics at art fairs. He was known as Human Instamatic before then. He made $7.5 per portrait he drew. By 1978, his record had been 27 fairs in a single day. His friends challenged him to move to New York since he was evidently superb at his job. Although the works of Martin Worth inspired the growth of hip hop culture, his creative arts leaves little to be desired in perpetuating societal values. Wong’s mature career began a few years before moving to New York. The works ranged from heartfelt renderings of the decaying Lower East Sides to playful and almost kitschy depictions of China Towns of San Francisco and New York. He drew and painted traffic signs for the hearing impaired too. Perhaps, the best known and remembered collaborative works of Wong is the alliance between him and Miguel Pinero, the Nuyorican poet. His paintings often combined the poetry of Pinero and the painstaking stylized finger spellings and cityscapes he drew and painted. The artist’s Loisaida pieces coupled with his collaboration with Pinero formed part of the Nuyorican movement (Wong 12). Nuyorican Movement that Wong became a significant part of refers to an intellectual and cultural movement that involves poets, artists, writers and musicians who are Puerto Rican descendents or have association with Puerto Rico and live near New York. He joined the group that had his origin in the 1960s and 1970s within the neighborhoods such as East Harlem, South Bronx and Loisaida as a means to validate the Puerto Rican experience in the United States of America. It was meant to better the standards of the poor and the working class populaces that suffered from ostracism, marginalization and discrimination. The term that they gave the group of artists was used as an insult until renowned artists such as Miguel Algarin reclaimed and transformed its meaning. Wong became a sound member of the movement and a participant in the many social and cultural functions that the movement organized. Among the social functions were Mixta Gallery, Agueybana Bookstore, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, El Maestro, El Museo del Barrio, Nuyorican Poets Café, the Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre and CHARAS/EI Bohio in the Lower East Side. The Nuyorican Movement in the 1980s encompassed a great deal of visual arts. Wong took after the pioneers of the movement; the likes of El Museo del Barrio. Painters and print makers such as Rafael Tufino Marcos Dimas, Fernando Salicrup and Nitza Tufino were the role models of Wong in the movement. He opted to take after collaborations between the painters and print makers with popular writers and poets such as Nicholasa Mohr and Sandra Maria Esteves (Wong 92). He complemented his visual images on paper with the famous writings, prose and poems of Pinero. During this time, Martin Wong collaborated with his lover, Pinero. One of the collaboration between the two gay lovers and artists was owned by Metropolitan Museum of the Art. In the 1980s and 1970s, graffiti inspired many artists. In addition to Wong, other artists such as Jean Michael Basquiat achieved tremendous recognition for their work. Artwork and collections by Wong have precedence in the urban visual journalism of Hopper’s Ash Can School. His artworks often sound a chord of Hopperesque big city loneliness. However, Wong tempers with a heart warmer than Hopper never pretended to temper. Throughout much of the artist’s time in New York, he specialized in describing East Village Tenements. He fixed the walls of the often derelict buildings as fine grids. Each of the wall bricks was uneven and individually depicted a rectangle. Although Wong was quite capable of rendering faces, figures and portraits, the walls he drew had as much character and traits as human presence. The walls tended to overshadow the presence of human beings. The outcome of these attempts is that the paintings powerfully communicate the unembroidered harshness of the 1980s of the east Village as a place to live in Wong became a connoisseur and collector of all forms of art from Asian antiques to graffiti. For a good part of 1980s, the artists made money from buying cheap and underpriced antiques at Christies and selling the merchandise to Sotheby’s at higher price. The collection of the artist in the form of graffiti grew to be one of the biggest in the world. In 1994, he donated the collection to Museum of the City of New York. He collected antiques of a wide array. Among these were artifacts of the pre-Columbian Cultures of Mesoamericans. There were antiques of the earliest Olmec civilization that were found reburied in important sites of later cultures of up to the Spanish Conquest. His antique collection comprised artifacts ranging from the dawn of civilization to the Dark Ages. They were artifacts ranging from Western Europe to the Caspian Sea. Although the origin of some of the antique collections of the artist were not specifically known and authenticated, there are claims that his assortment of artifacts embraced the cultures of Egypt, Rome Greece and near East. Authenticity of these claims cannot be ascertained although there are indeed artifacts that showed resemblance to the objects in the regions. Graffiti collection of Wong was not new in the art scene. Drawings and writings that have been scribbled, sprayed or scratched illicitly on walls or other surfaces in public places have existed since the ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Roman Empire. The graffiti collections of Wong were expressions of underlying political and social messages. In addition, some of the graffiti collections were signs used by gangs to mark their territories. The principle exhibition of Wong’s works since the New Museum retrospective of 1998 and final death from AIDS related complications in 1999 aggravated a sense of nostalgia. The subject that reigned supreme during the exhibition was more than the missed presence of the artist. The main subject of the exhibition was the nine paintings of Wong on display. The nine paintings reflected the images of Lower East Side and East Village of the painter during the 1980s. The paintings documented a seedy, but religious area. He represented how the area and the artwork of the time had been lost to gentrification. The nine paintings ranged from 3 by 2 feet to more than 13 by 8 feet. One of the rooms in which the paintings were installed featured the works of Wong peopled with residents of the Alphabet City. The other room featured the works of Wong that he had devoted to his near life-size store front pictures. In these works, the only sign of human existence were the plethora of chained and padlocked accordion fences, which protected the buildings from unauthorized and unwanted entries. Several of the tableaux depicted small community churches. Another showed a verdant public garden. The verdant pubic gardens were a representation of a feature that was widely present in the areas of Lower East Side and East Village of the 1980s. Their presence added authentic irony to the poignant renditions of the urbanized environments. Up to date, there are still graffiti in Wong’s neighborhood. There are colorful wall murals. In addition, there are the streets and bodegas used as communal and other times as clandestine gathering spaces. These areas have great works of graffiti. There are still signs of the artist’s works on some rubble ridden and abandoned lot popularly known as “It is Not What You Think, What is it Then?” One of the most stunning works of Wong in the show was Pentecostal Cedros de Dios (Wong 132). The beautiful storefront work of Wong is a depiction of the church once supervised and overseen by Rev. Roberto Vasquez at the 25 Avenue B. the site is at the present occupied by Basque inspired hipster restaurant. The location now hosts one of the trendiest boites in the neighborhood. The patrons are most unlikely to be drawn from the nearby housing project. The Pentecostal Cedros de Dios displays a white façade behind a gray metallic accordion fence. As with the case with many other churches drawn by Wong, the Pentecostal Cedros de Dios is identified by a stenciled symbol above the entrance. The stenciled sign is in vibrant red and black. Unlike other Martin Wong’s artworks, Pentecostal Cedros de Dios lacks the chains and padlocks that punctuate and crisscross other depictions. Instead of the chains and padlocks, the surface of Pentecostal Cedros de Dios is activated by Martin Wong’s bravura brushwork. There are the tonal range of interlocking grays and whites that make up the fence and the façade. Pentecostal Cedros de Dios depicts some occasional touches of incidental color which are both purely painterly flourished and ground level storefront stains (Wong 02). Martin Wong had a high affinity for his neighborhood and his medium. These were conveyed through a poetic sense of place and time. These were evident in the works of the artists on his works on overpopulated tenements with primitivizing, art brut directness as observed in Study for La Vida of 1984. It is also evident in the plain garage door façade with some abstract remains of washed off graffiti as observed in Houston Street of 1996. In the same manner, the artist is a sound historian and had a powerful historical testament. This is evident in the developments and progress along Loisaida Avenue (Wong 62). For all the details of the works of Wong, the artworks are something other than realistic. By the personal description of the artist, he was a devoted tourist in Loisaida in the Hispanic Lower East Side. In this locale, the artist had an inspiring guide with Pinero. The artwork of Wong is full of the life in Loisaida. There are elements of flowerings in graffiti art in the locale and the writings of poets like Pinero. His artworks also depict the depth of poverty in the region as well as the deep-seated violence. Additionally, Wong’s works are full of visual picture of different forms of grab bags of devices for dealing with his own personal experience. For instance, Martin Wong says that he draws to represent the same ability of Chinese artists and writers to write poems in the sky. Lousaida, Prison series and other Chinatown works of the artists are disappointing in comparison. Most of the works that occupied the time of the artist in the early 1990s place Wong at a rather plain and unattractive artistic position. They portray him as a conventional pop artist than he was seen before. He knowingly reproduced stereotyped images from mass culture. In this case, Wong produced a sort of hometown chinoiserie. He produced poster-like images of Kung Fu as Bruce Lee star or as Green Hornet’s sidekick Kato (Wong 32). These poster-like paintings were in glaring colors that were extremely far from subdued. They were ferruginous tones that had at one time characterized Worth’s palette. A different and more successful Worth’s Chinatown paintings retain the old coloristic reserve. However, the coloristic stance for the first time depicted interiors with figures. The figures were mostly men and women in drag. Among these paintings is the 1992 tondo In the Studio where two female painters prepare to portray a nude male model in some space constructed of an intricate set of interlocking planes. Additionally, Saturday Night of the same year offers more ambiguous scene where hedonistic portrayal of two women bathing one another. The image could have come out of soft-core porn magazine. It could be true that the artist’s work could have taken the ill direction had health complications not set in to get him thinking of leaving a legacy. Indeed, he inspired the hip hop culture with his graffiti collection and paintings. His work, however, has very little to learn from in a way of using art to perpetuate societal values. Work Cited Wong, Martin, Sean Corcoran, and Carlo McCormick. City As Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection. , 2013. Print. Wong, Martin, Dan Cameron, and Amy Scholder. Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong. New York: Rizzoli, 1998. Print. 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