Sold for $1,100,000

Provenance:
Semaphore Gallery. New York
Private Collection, New York, 1984
Gifted to the present owner by the above in 1989

Lot note:
Martin Wong was born in Portland, Oregon in 1946 and came of age artistically in the heady California dreamscape of late 1960s San Francisco. Living in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of Merry Pranksters and Grateful Dead infamy, Wong an openly gay man of Chinese ancestry, found acceptance in the free spirited, open-minded and mind expansive ideologies of the hippie lifestyle, while experimenting creatively in ceramic and performance art. Above all a painter, it was Wong’s works in the second dimension that earned him the most recognition in the Bay Area and the fabled handle Human Instamatic for his facility for cranking out $7.50 portraits at street art fairs and communal happenings. 

In 1978 Wong switched coasts, moving to New York’s Lower East Side, mythically on a friendly “if you can make it there…” type dare, to forge his path as an artist in the postpunk, postmodern epicenter of culture and cool. In New York Wong focused his creative energy on painting using his representation talents to compose edgy, enigmatic and existential character studies of the city, its denizens, buildings, bricks, concrete, steel and pavement, primarily limiting this raw documentation to the sourced sights and sites of his immediate neighborhood. For the most part a self-taught painter, Wong’s canvases identifiably have a naïve visionary quality, sensitively balancing fantastic wonder with observed reality, paint handling imbued with an overall haunting sense of longing, that seems to explore what it means to belong to a group. An artists’ artist, Wong established himself as fixture on the Low East Side art scene, supporting his passion for paint with a day job at the MOMA giftshop, also picking and flipping undervalued antiquities at auction to make ends meet. Just as he enjoyed fellowship with the dropped-out freaks in Frisco, Wong connected deeply with the emerging east coast underground culture of hip hop, specifically the graffiti element, importantly co-founding the Museum of American Graffiti in 1989 and generously donating his own impressive collection of artworks by graffiti pioneers to the Museum of the City of New York in 1994. Wong joined forces romantically and creatively with Nuyorican underground poet and playwright Miguel Piñero after the two met at an exhibition opening at alternative project space ABC No Rio in 1982. The pair’s time together was inspired and productive, with Wong creating many of his most innovative and accomplished painting during their partnership, culminating in Wong’s ambitious 1984 solo show Urban Landscapes at the taste making Semaphore Gallery.

Painted in these salad days and acquired at Semaphore the year it was painted, Persuit (El Que Gane Pierde - He Who Wins Looses), 1984, is a self-consciously ominous New York nocturne, a surprisingly illusionistic wooden frame peppered with poetic phrasing, presumably words burrowed from his often collaborator Piñero, borders a clue that sleight-of-hand could be at play, a view finder, capturing and celebrating this authentically gritty New York minute. In his signature uncommon social meets magical realist fashion, Wong gracefully champions the underdog, the underrepresented, the unseen, revealing the unique and flawed glory of these ignored individuals, also the components that comprises the greater structural whole of an equally marred and magnificent metropolis. A comfortable insider to outsider or even outlaw company, Wong plays with this captivating contradiction visually and conceptually, arranging the composition with gorgeously detailed barriers and boundaries of crumbling brick facades, confining fences, locked gates and closed doors, challenging the audience to uneasily decide which side of the conflict or tracks they reside on, are you a part of, or apart from. In the lower left corner of Persuit…, a shadowy figure ambiguously give chase as loser or be chased as winner, either on the Ignatz Mouse or the Krazy Kat end of the brick toss, depending on the viewer’s chosen vantage, voyeur of the locked in or witness to the locked out. The phrase El Que Gane Pierde, which translates to the antagonistic Whoever Wins Loses also emphatically appears in the charged closing scene of Piñero’s 1984 play Short Eyes, loosely about his incarceration experience, lending credence to a potential jailbreak read of the subject’s trajectory. The lone actor blends with his staged surroundings, partially obscured by the stylized grid of a chain link fence, dwarfed by a desolate righthand crowded backdrop of apartment building geometry, obsessively rendered with Wong’s hallmark exposed brick motifs, enduring monuments of urban progress, a somber stoic chorus more than scenery. Overhead a cryptic surreal constellation map, a visual language of pattern parallel to the fingerspelling iconography the artist frequently employed, stands in as night sky accentuating the intoxicating mystery of the foreboding narrative unfolding. This carefully articulated and decisively stylized star chart dually provides shelter of darkness and celestial navigation guiding our hero hopefully to an escape of transcendent negating outcome, the sublime symbolism of the draw. 

Wong sadly lost his battle with AIDS in 1999, dying from complications of the illness years prior to his work receiving the universal acclaim it earns today. Always painstaking in the organization of his vision, following being diagnosed in 1994 Wong was able to realize his full body of work to a level of completion he felt resolved, satisfyingly defining his own destiny as that of a lasting legacy of artistic wins.