Accompanying a major retrospective exhibition, this catalog explores Martin Wong's work and its relationship with Asian art and culture, from premodern artifacts to visions of Chinatown in New York and San Francisco

Published with Halsted A&A Foundation.

A visionary among contemporary artists from the 1970s to 1990s in the United States, Martin Wong embraced a multifaceted individualism as an Asian American queer painter and poet who freely explored and traversed ethnic and racial identities; challenged cultural, racial and ethnic stereotypes; and found creative sources through intersections of psychedelic theatre performance, calligraphy, poetry, graffiti and Asian art.
Chinatown USA investigates the liminal spaces the artist occupied and traces the development of Wong's work through his connection with the arts and culture of Asia. In particular, it highlights his explorations of Chinatowns in conjunction with counterculture communities (such as Puerto Rican poets and Black and Latino graffiti artists) in New York and San Francisco.
Martin Wong was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1946 and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. In 1978 he moved to New York and exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore and P-P-O-W, among others, before returning to San Francisco, where he died in 1999 from AIDS-related illness. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate, among others.