Kwan yuen wong biography of martin

He created posters and sets for the gay street performance troupe the Cockettes and joined their mystical offshoot, the Angels of Light. He traveled through Asia and Europe. He never returned to school—not, at least, in a conventional sense.

Kwan yuen wong biography of martin: Experience: 香港政府食物及衛生局研究局 · Education: The Chinese

By his account, he got free rent in exchange for working as a night porter. His bedroom there is the subject of a meticulous painting, My Secret World —81that recalls similar works by Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. On the bookshelf is fiction by John Cheever and Raymond Chandler, as well as texts on astrology and sports. He started showing his work downtown and got to know the local graffiti artists.

By the end of his life, he had amassed a significant holding of street art. Inhe donated it to the Museum of the City of New York. In that painting, Wong offers a detailed vision of a graffiti mural done on a handball court wall. In Attorney Streetchainlink fences surround the handball court, and red-brick tenements loom like prison watchtowers.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American painter. For the American and Chinese computer scientist, electrical engineer, and university administrator, see Martin D. Wong in in New York. Portland, OregonUnited States. San FranciscoCalifornia, United States.

Biography [ edit ]. Early years [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Legacy [ edit ]. Exhibitions [ edit ]. Posthumous exhibitions [ edit ]. Notable works in public collections [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Citations and references [ edit ]. Citations [ edit ]. The New York Times. These writings were highly anecdotal, semi-autobiographical, and stylistically, resembled stream-of-consciousness.

Artistically, Wong was also interested in the nascent graffiti art scene of downtown New York in the s and s and sought to promote it as a legitimate art form. Critical acclaim of his work has continued after his death and his works can be found in collections around the world. Accessed February 4, Navarro, Mireya. Wong embraced and extended these incompatibilities.

The painting Heaven recalls the jade bi placed in neolithic Chinese graves as manifestations of the cosmos, but also remains a glory hole. As viewers, we are left to grapple with these discrepancies. Wong suspends us between things. Sometimes he leaves us dangling at more concrete thresholds. The feeling of access rubs up against a feeling of distance.

Lifesize storefronts immerse us in a city that simultaneously blocks entry with security gates and locked hatches. In prison paintings, one wonders if we are like the inmates or the guards tasked with their bondage.

Kwan yuen wong biography of martin: Kwan Y. Wong ; Affiliation.

We watch the inmates sleep through cell bars and catch their eye through the aperture of a door. Our relationship to the people we witness and our place among them rarely resolves. Some found his ebullience too hot for a scene that privileged coolness. The way he clung to the canvas chafed against efforts by artists like Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer to bring art out of the studio and usher it into the world.

Worse still, his nostalgic realism was out of step with post-conceptualism and the deconstruction of the art object. While others interrogated what it meant to make art, Wong embraced the long tradition of painting, narrativity and illusionism wholesale.

Kwan yuen wong biography of martin: Exhibition press release for "Ten Chinatown:

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. Painting like he did was a lonely violation of art world tenets, leaving Wong in a private, hallucinatory realm. And, indeed, Wong carved out his own cosmos.

Lunch was often eaten at three in the morning. The rhythms of the city became faint echoes— Voices 12 —heard only through the window. My Secret Worldshows us his quarters, hemmed in by votives, books and his own artwork. Paintings of dice and a magic eight-ball find their sources on the other side of the room, enacting a loop of self-reference.