![]() His seminal work My Secret World (1978–1981) (1984) refers to these early years at Meyer’s Hotel through a trompe l’oeil, providing a voyeuristic view into his world. He was a voracious consumer of books on astrology, mythology, Asian identity, sports, male erotica, magazines, and newspapers. Moving from the colorful and utopic San Francisco to the more bleak, dilapidated New York City, the artist’s first years on the East Coast became an intimate period dominated by isolation, reading, listening, and learning. Using a hotel room as studio, Wong dedicated himself to the medium of painting and kept an fast production pace, which would last for the remainder of his career. In New York, Martin Wong settled in the former Meyer’s Grand Hotel at the South Street Seaport in 1978, where he would remain for nearly three years, working as a night porter, which provided him free lodging. In 1978, Wong decided to pursue his artistic career and moved to New York. His community-oriented drawings from this period focus on capturing Eureka’s crab fishermen, SRO hotel lobbies, bars, and friends in a community threatened by gentrification.Īs Wong’s practice turned more towards painting, he started exploring the visual tropes of ‘chance’ and ‘destiny,’ by including stellar constellations, dice, and the eight ball, as seen in his painting Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball (Eureka) (1978).Įventually breaking with the Angels of Light Free Theater in 1973, he moved back to Humboldt County. In 1975, Wong establishes his “Human Instamatic” portrait business, charging $5 for a hand-drawn portrait and $25 for a painted one. ![]() Drawing on the iconography he encountered during his travels to Europe, India, and Afghanistan, Wong developed an impressive symbolic system inspired by Tantric painting and Kufic architecture, amongst others.ĭuring his formative years on the West Coast, Wong dived into the American counterculture with its drugs, free love, collectivity, and theatrical performance, portraying both the urban environments he ventured through as well as the characters he met along the way. In the late 1960s, Wong became part of the theater group The Cockettes, and in the early 1970s he joined their breakout group Angels of Light Free Theater producing sets and costumes that reflected the collective’s interest in expanded perceptions, utopia, Hindu Kaliyuga, psychedelics, and queer self-expression. ![]() Wong found a kinship in Chinese cultural expressions in calligraphy, which became an aesthetic that he would continuously adapt in his poetry scrolls. He was likewise influenced by the passion he shared with his mother, Florence Wong Fie, for antique and pop-cultural objects, as well as ancient Chinese ceramics. In the early years of his artistic practice, Martin Wong studied ceramics and printmaking at Humboldt State University, California. ![]()
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