Martin Wong – “Human Instamatic”
Through February 14, 2016
The Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse
(718) 681-6000
Martin Wong: Human Instamatic will be the first museum retrospective of the work of Chinese-American painter Martin Wong (1946-1999) since his untimely death. This project gains momentum from recent exhibitions examining Wong as a collector and source of inspiration for contemporary artists: City as Canvas (Museum of the City of New York, 2014); Dahn Vo, I M U U R 2 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013); and Taiping Tianguo: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2012; and e-flux, NY, 2014). In contrast, Human Instamatic will offer the first in-depth assessment of Wong’s formal contributions as a painter, placing his work in line with such 20th-century painters as Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel, both renowned for their insightful portraits of the communities in which they lived. Co-curated by Sergio Bessa and Yasmin Ramirez, the exhibition will feature over 90 of Wong’s paintings with rarely-seen archival materials from the Martin Wong Papers at the Fales Library of New York University.
Human Instamatic will explore Wong’s engagement with his community as a major concern of his practice. The exhibition will trace Wong’s development as an artist, beginning with his transition from an introspective youth in San Francisco painting haunting self-portraits to his self-identification in the mid-1970s as the “Human Instamatic,” a street artist selling portraits of passersby in Eureka, CA. Human Instamatic will highlight Wong’s later years in New York City, where he played a pivotal role in the Lower East Side (LES) arts scene in the 1980s/90s, a period in which he created an oeuvre immortalizing the vibrancy of a resilient, artistic, and multi-ethnic community facing displacement. The exhibition features Wong’s diaristic renderings of the LES Latino community, NYC’s Chinatown, graffiti artists, and later works created in San Francisco, where he returned in 1994.
About Martin Wong
Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1946, Martin Wong was raised in San Francisco, California, and came of age during the city’s blossoming countercultural movement. He studied art at Humboldt State University (1964-1968) and after graduation worked closely with the legendary performance art collectives Angels of Light and the Cockettes in San Francisco. Wong created elaborate sets and costumes for these collectives and documented their work from a rare insider’s point of view. In 1978, Wong moved to New York City, first occupying a room at the Meyer’s Hotel, which he described in a letter to a friend as the last remaining single occupancy hotel at the waterfront. In 1982, he relocated to the Lower East Side until his return to San Francisco in the late ’90s, where he lived under his parents’ care while fighting AIDS. Martin Wong died in 1999.
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