A long-unseen, 12-foot-wide painting by artist Martin Wong, who created a unique visual vocabulary in the steaming cauldron of 1980s New York alongside artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, will go on view next month at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, courtesy of New York–based gallery P.P.O.W. The work is a fascinating statement about his Asian American heritage and includes a rare portrait of the artist’s mother, Florence Wong Fie, and his stepfather, Benjamin Wong Fie.
Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo), painted in 1982, went on public view exactly once, in the 1987 group show “The Mind’s I, Part 1,” at the Asian Arts Institute in New York, and has languished in the gallery’s storage space ever since. Why?
“Martin’s mother didn’t like it,” PPOW cofounder Wendy Olsoff told ARTnews during a recent visit to the gallery just before the painting was to be packed up so it could be shipped to South Florida. The central panel depicts Florence and Benjamin in the nude, and Florence prohibited the exhibition of the painting out of modesty.
The painting elevates Chinese American history, adopting a classical Western three-panel altarpiece format. The central panel shows the couple, in poses directly echoing French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s painting The Abduction of Psyche (1895). Benjamin takes the role of Cupid, wings spread, lifting a bespectacled Florence into the air. Behind them is a classic Chinatown scene with pagoda-style architecture, and three Chinese figures, two of them women holding fans, are at their feet.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Abduction of Psyche (1895).
A scroll above their head reads “Tai Ping Kuo,” referring to the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that stretched from 1850 to 1864, during the Qing dynasty, and is estimated to have killed as many as 30 million, or 10 percent of China’s population at the time. (For comparison, the US Civil War is estimated to have resulted in perhaps 700,000 deaths.) It also resulted in major emigration, forming the backdrop to the Wong family’s immigration story.
The central panel is flanked to the left by a scene showing a woman in an elaborate feathered headdress and traditional Chinese garb, playing a drum, while the figure at the right wears an operatic costume and is based on Chung Kuei (Zhong Kui), a Chinese general who became a folkloric figure, a demon slayer, according to Isaac Alpert, the gallery’s director of estates. The white face paint sometimes denotes an evil figure, and that touch may have drawn on Wong’s association with the San Francisco theater troupe Angels of Light. He serves as a stand-in for the artist, carrying a painter’s palette and paintbrushes.
Martin Wong, right, at the 1987 reception for the exhibition “The Mind’s I, Part 1,” at the Asian Arts Institute in New York, with his painting Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo), 1982, on the back wall.
courtesy PPOW.
In the catalog for the Asian Arts Institute show, curator Robert Lee wrote that Asian American artists were less likely than other ethnicities to focus on self-portraiture, raising a question: “How is the Asian artist sense of self changing and how does it relate to artists of different backgrounds working with similar themes?” Metropolitan Museum of Art associate curator Lowery S. Sims wrote perceptively about Wong’s work, which she described as “a furious synthesis of the Lower East Side of New York City, as well as being about his own very special synthesis of the myriad stimulae that greet him every time he emerges onto the street. Oriental, Italian, Black, Hispanic and Slavic influences program and are fed into the menu in the computer of Wong’s creativity.”
The imagery in the piece ties together many strings and strands in his work, said Olsoff. His interest in astrology is present in the stars that shine in the sky behind his parents, connected by lines to show constellations; his love of painting New York’s brick buildings is hinted at in the building behind the figure at right; and the two women fanning themselves in the central panel show up in other paintings. A Chinatown landscape from San Francisco, where Wong grew up, is shown in the central panel, with buildings marked with signs reading “chop suey” and “laundry,” the latter referring to a profession many Chinese immigrants were forced into but in which some thrived. Wong’s father worked in a laundromat; his mother, an accomplished engineer, lived upstairs and met him there, said Olsoff.
Florence Wong Fie, Martin Wong, and Benjamin Wong Fie.
courtesy PPOW.
While it is de rigueur for artists to emphasize their heritage and identity in their work today, Lee’s description of Asian artists’ misgivings about painting their own identity in Wong’s early time in New York, where he had only moved several years before, was on the money, says Olsoff. “Martin told me he was unsure how to paint his own history,” she said. His parents were Chinese American, but his father had Mexican heritage, so Wong labeled himself ethnically Chino-Latino.
Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo) will appear in an upcoming show at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, “Martin Wong: Chinatown USA” next spring. P.P.O.W is also organizing a show in April that will feature some largely unknown bodies of work, including representations of Popeye.
Art Basel Miami Beach director Bridget Finn was very recently making the rounds of exhibitors when Olsoff very casually mentioned that the gallery would bring a large Wong work, but even she was surprised to find it measured 12 feet wide.
“The history of Martin Wong is so incredible and so relevant in terms of contemporary art history of the Americas,” said Finn in a phone interview. “His elevating of Asian and Asian American art history in the Western canon is undeniable. His was such a defining American moment in New York City and given that Art Basel Miami Beach is the largest fair in the Americas, it makes so much sense for P.P.O.W to bring this work, and it’s such an honor to have galleries think, ‘What can we bring that is part of the narrative of contemporary art made in the Americas?’, and that the fair is a place to introduce these works into the market.” The fair’s enormous quarters, in the Miami Beach Convention Center, also allow dealers to show works at a scale they simply couldn’t show at, say, Art Basel Paris, with its more intimate booths.
Institutional support of Wong is deep. His work resides in museum collections globally, including, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. In just the last two years, institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art, Arkansas’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Hong Kong’s M+, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and London’s Tate have added works to their collections, Olsoff noted.
Martin Wong, Grant Avenue, San Francisco (1990-92).
Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy PPOW.
“Human Instamatic,” a comprehensive Wong retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2015 before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. From 2022 to 2024, the first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, “Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief,” debuted at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid and traveled to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Camden Art Centre in London before appearing at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Artists, too, continue to engage with his legacy. For example, when Vietnam-born artist Danh Vo won the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum, he devoted his resulting exhibition to the display of Wong’s collection of curios, souvenirs, antique ceramics and scrolls, which he discovered when he visited Florence in San Francisco, as well as examples of Wong’s own work.
Martin Wong, Clones of Bruce Lee (1990/92), at PPOW’s display at the Felix art fair in Los Angeles in February 2020.
Brian Boucher
The market continues to support his work: A day sale at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday included his standout painting Clones of Bruce Lee (1990/92), which bore a guarantee; estimated at up to $600,000, it fetched $812,000, far more than the gallery was asking when it showed the work at Los Angeles’s Felix Art Fair in 2020. (It has also been requested for the Wrightwood show.) The artist’s auction record stands at $1.6 million, set in 2024 at Christie’s New York for the great Potrait of Mikey Piñero at Ridge Street and Stanton (1985). All of Wong’s top ten works at auction have sold since 2019.
“Supply is short,” Olsoff noted. The piece is priced accordingly, especially considering its scale and uniqueness, at $1.6 million, matching his auction record.
Florence died in 2017, and only now does Olsoff feel like she can show the painting. Even so, she seems a little anxious about it.
“She is so mad at me right now.”
