![]() Wong’s effective depiction of city life is powered by a compound spatial-pictorial-emotional effect that smashes through divisions between the felt, seen, and daydreamed. The setting is New York, but could just as easily be 1990s Berlin. Two people snuggle at the base of another scarred brick wall, in the hollow lot where another building once stood. No Es Lo Que Has Pensado… (It’s Not What You Think…), from 1984, depicts a more explicit tenderness. Meanwhile, cartoon sign language emblems-a signature Wong motif-overlay a constellation in the sky. The composition is elsewhere packed with buildings which, leaning slightly and painted in infinitesimal brushstrokes, seem weirdly alive. ![]() A sooty brick wall holds the foreground, its windows plugged with cinder blocks. Nocturne at Ridge Street and Stanton (1987) shows an unpeopled but warm cityscape. In 1984, New York Magazine wrote of Wong’s downtown Manhattan: “nowhere have the tensions and dramas of been more starkly displayed.” 2 Set aside the differences between the cities and eras, and the same has recently been true of Mitte, the Berlin district in which KW is situated. “Even now,” Wong wrote in a hand-calligraphed 1986 press release, “it’s like the moment in these paintings never existed.” His home cities-his subject-were being gentrified to oblivion. In depicting a disappeared America, Wong’s retrospective holds a mirror to the lost world which surrounds KW itself. But there’s an anxiety buried in this enthusiasm. A quarter-century after Wong’s death, this injustice has been corrected, and this Berlin retrospective of his antic, steamy, humane, and superlatively accessible take on Chinatown San Francisco and New York, from the 1970s to the ’90s, has been lauded. ![]() 1 A self-styled “representative of an economically oppressed urban class consisting largely of Blacks, Hispanics and Asians,” the American artist had been snubbed by curators and critics. In a 1988 catalog essay, the poet and critic John Yau sketched out the social dimension of Martin Wong’s painting and sculpture.
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