Mischief Managed: Martin Wong at the Stedelijk Museum
“Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief” at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam — running Nov 3, 2023 until Apr 1, 2024 — is the final leg of a touring retrospective that marks the first major European exhibition of work by Chinese-American artist, Martin Wong (1946-1999). Having debuted at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid before making its way to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) and the Camden Art Centre (London), the show represents a survey of the Wong’s career – from his roots in San Francisco and Eureka, California, where he grew up the child of American-born Chinese parents, to New York where he made himself known as an urban chronicler and critical observer of the American counter-culture of the 1970s-1990s. It tackles social, sexual, and political themes across queer existence, racial and marginal communities, and gentrification.
13 November 2023 – To be honest, I went in knowing very little about Martin Wong. I didn’t even know about the exhibition until I saw a poster for it at the museum’s entrance — a friend and I were actually there for Nan Goldin’s “This Will Not End Well” — and it took me an an embarrassing 15 minutes to clock that Dyana had actually posted about Martin Wong during AAPI month last year. If anything, though, my rather delayed realisation highlights one aspect of Martin Wong’s oeuvre that “Malicious Mischief” manages to capture well: it has to be experienced in-person.
Some artworks look better online. They’ve been shot to perfection, colour-corrected, and posed (literally) in the best light; and once uploaded, you can zoom to your heart’s content at the click of a button and find details that are often and unfortunately forgettable in real life, whether because they’re too small to be noticed at a cursory glance, or because the artwork’s composition itself is a little lacking – your eyes don’t know where they’re supposed to look.
Martin Wong’s paintings in “Malicious Mischief” are the opposite of this. They’re like a somber breakfast buffet for the eyes, packed with details and texture that are lost almost entirely when displayed on a screen that somehow makes a 2GB image file still look 480p. Hung up at the correct height and viewed at full scale, however, they’re remarkable portals into the Lower East Side underworld that Martin Wong inhabited while fraternising with the thieves, drug dealers, drug addicts, queer community, and graffiti artists whom he sought to valorise. Largely self-taught, Wong breathes realism into his paintings with his uncanny ability to make space extend and recend beyond the canvas; this spatiality is, once again, something that comes across deftly in the museum’s installation and less so in images.
Critics of sterile white walls, rejoice – you won’t find any here at this exhibition. Instead, the walls are painted in rich and immersive colours that act as a guide to the exhibition’s thematic contours (n.b. it did also make the white balance on my phone’s camera go beserk...)
First up is a saturnine maroon framing Wong’s early work: hallucinatory visions where Buddhist iconography, the Wild West, and rural America coalesce. Next, a few rooms later, you find yourself surrounded by languid navy walls that are a little foreboding in a hall with higher ceilings and patches of what looks like exposed brick (a New York real estate agent’s paradise), but are actually enormous trompe-l’oeil paintings. Wong’s move to New York in 1978 brought two new subjects to his paintings: the endless brickwork that encases the Lower East Side’s cramped tenement blocks, and American Sign Language which he translated into a stylised visual alphabet that originated from an artist residency he did with the city’s Department of Transportation sign shop.
Some highlights: “Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder” brings together the brick motif and ASL for an attention-grabbing notice board that makes almost you rethink your senses; do you seeing or hearing a painting, and what does painting for the hearing impaired even mean? As for a synthesis on a larger scale, one can’t miss “Stripped Trans Am at Ave. C and 5th Street”, a dystopian scene with a building, deep in disrepair, that peeks just out of a simulated wooden frame and a car, seemingly burnt to the bones, teetering dangerously near the edge.
The third of four themes examines Wong’s depictions of New York’s subaltern classes, set against a pale green background that’s somehow both clinical and yet sickly. In one room, naturalistic paintings of shuttered storefronts—of Puerto Rican family businesses buckling under the pressures of gentrification—are propped up close to the ground just as Wong intended. In the next room, mounted paintings offer disorientating snapshots of the city’s Kafkaesque correctional system. The label for the exhibition’s titular work, “Malicious Mischief” (1991), identifies Wong’s purpose: “As a form of empowerment, he inverted the roles of good and bad, normative and non-normative by ridiculing and sexualizing law enforcement officers, who were known at the time for their corruption and manipulative practices.”
Rounding off the rather impressive show is a large final hall painted in bright canary yellow highlighting Wong’s final body of work: pop-culture-fuelled, utopian fantasies of Chinatown from the 1990s. Densely populated with an eclectic cast of celebrity personalities, unfamiliar strangers, and assorted symbols, these imagined scenes curiously echo Wong’s early work, bringing the exhibition full circle as if to mirror Wong’s own final years. Diagnosed with an HIV/AIDS-related illness after bouts of psychiatric care and hospitalisation for pneumonia, Wong packed up in New York and returned to San Francisco to rejoin his family and friends on the West Coast. The exhibition’s final wall text reads: “Despite his rapidly deteriorating health, he continued to paint right up until his death in 1999.”
Survey exhibitions like “Malicious Mischief” can go a couple different ways. In an ideal world, a visitor who going in knowing nothing would be able to walk away with a pretty good idea of the artist’s life, art, and where the artist stands in relation to any other art history they may know – easier said than done. The wide scope of survey shows runs the risk of overwhelming visitors with too much detail, too many objects on display, and too many narrative threads that never really come together at the end. This is where the coloured walls come in. It’s not uncommon for exhibitions to be arranged thematically, but the implied cognitive structure that it offers falls flat instead when the thematic layout depends on signage (which isn’t always read or much less remembered) — or puts the burden of making the displays make sense onto the visitor, a little much to ask of the non-specialists audiences whom curators ultimately want to reach, when the modern attention span can stay focused for about 45 seconds.
At “Malicious Mischief”, you might miss the wall text and you might miss the labels, but there’s no way you can miss the starkly colour-coded backgrounds that are always announcing which of the four themes in Martin Wong’s oeuvre is in the spotlight. One of my undergraduate supervisors used to say that it’s more important to understand the vibes than it is to remember facts, figures, and details. And the vibes were fantastic with this one at the Stedelijk.
Entry to “Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief” runs until April 1, 2024 and is included with general admission.
By: Helen Kwong