B
orn in 1946 to Chinese immigrant parents in Portland, Oregon, Martin Wong would go on to become one of the most distinct documentarians of New York City life. In 1978, Wong embarked for New York to forge his career as an artist and established himself as a fixture within the Lower East Side’s developing art scene, where he both lived and worked. Wong has said of his paintings and location that “Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live and the people are the people I know and see all the t.mes
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Comparable works by Martin Wong in Distinguished Museum collects ions
“Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live and the people are the people I know and see all the t.mes ."
In 1994, Wong was diagnosed with AIDS and with a decline in his health, chose to move back to San Francisco. Painted in the last years of his life and likely one of his last paintings before leaving New York, Winter Scene, is a dark and gritty yet romanticized rendition of New York’s Lower East Side. As Wong neared the end of his life, Winter Scene is a reflection of his t.mes in New York, with the theme of winter likely as a metaphor for the waning stage of the artist's life, infused with Wong’s signature style. Crowded and eclectic buildings are depicted from a higher vantage point, making the only thing visible in the work the buildings and the night sky.
ART © 2022 THE MARTIN WONG FOUNDATION
Wong often juxtaposes the harsh realities of city life with optimism and beauty, in so doing making them surprisingly indistinguishable. This beauty is represented by the mapping of stars and constellations, an impossible reality in a crowded and polluted city. Moreover, present work represents the combination of two of Wong's most important aesthetic and symbolic subjects—converting the developed city whom few would romanticize into a beautiful landscape that inspires hope in a world that otherwise many would have cast as simply dirty or dangerous. Created during what has been considered by several scholars to be Wong's most iconic period in which the artist created paintings that unite cityscapes with a luminescent night sky, the present work was created alongside and in tandem with many of the artist's most celebrated paintings, now included in various esteemed public collects ions in the United States.
Martin Wong’s paintings are held in some of the most distinguished public and private collects ions throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
RIGHT: Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York
