Although largely self-taught as a painter, Wong succeeded in gaining significant recognition in the highly competitive New York art world of the 1980s. Defying easy classification, his intellectually and psychologically complex paintings have been described both as social realist and as visionary.

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Challenging dominant racist notions of the limited range of subjects appropriate for an Asian-American artist, Wong focused primarily upon Latino and African-American subjects throughout the 1980s. In the following decade, he turned his attention to his Chinese-American heritage, creating bold paintings that combined childhood memories with spectacular Hollywood versions of Asian culture.

Belying the seeming naïveté of some aspects of his style, Wong incorporated references to the art of many different cultures in his images. His wide-ranging interests also were manifested in his extensive collections of many types of objects, ranging from children's lunch boxes to medieval Persian miniatures.

Fascinated with street culture, Wong became the most important individual patron of American graffiti art. In 1986, he co-founded with Peter Broda the Graffiti Museum, now incorporated into the Museum of the City of New York.

Background and Formal Education

Martin Victor Wong was born on July 11, 1946, in Portland, Oregon, where his grandfather owned a jewelry business. An only child, he was raised by his Chinese-American parents in San Francisco, where they worked for Standard Oil and Bechtel Corporation.

In a 1993 interview with Elisa Lee, Wong remarked that his grandparents and other members of his extended family had a profound influence on his personal development, combining as they did the spirit of "the Wild West" with involvement in Chinese civil rights politics.

Revealing precocious artistic talent, Wong began painting when he was 13 years old. His mother strongly encouraged her son's interest in art, and she began systematically preserving all indications of his talent. Now an invaluable resource for scholars of the art of Wong and his associates, the substantial archive of materials that she collected and organized over the course of several decades is housed at Fales Library, New York University.

In addition, Wong demonstrated an early attraction to men in uniform. As a young boy, he became familiar to many firemen and policemen, as he ran down the streets after their vehicles.

After graduating from George Washington High School in San Francisco in 1964, Wong studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1968.

Although Wong largely abandoned ceramics by the early 1980s, his study of this medium had a significant impact on his career as a painter. For instance, the emphasis placed in ceramics training upon the properties of pigments helped him to develop a strong appreciation of subtle shifts of tone. More specifically, the hues that he utilized most frequently during the 1980s (burnt sienna, ochre, and umber) can be related to his experience in ceramics.

Further, the prominence of bricks in his works attests to his enduring fascination with clay. Brick walls constitute the sole subject of some paintings, such as Rapture (1988), which consists of three interconnected oval canvases, illusionistically painted to resemble worn brick walls.

In addition, Wong's commitment to technical refinement and his systematic investigation of the properties and possibilities of the painting medium can be related to his education as a ceramicist. During the period that Wong studied ceramics, most American university programs in painting downplayed and even denigrated technical skill and emphasized instead a largely conceptual approach to art making. As a result, many painters of Wong's generation sought emphatically crude methods of execution. However, because of the complex, difficult, and potentially dangerous processes involved in the medium, technical matters continued to be emphasized in the training of artists in ceramics.

Wong in Eureka and San Francisco, 1964-1978

While attending Humboldt State, Wong began living in nearby Eureka. He remained based in this small town on the northern coast of California until 1978. Surrounded by awe-inspiring redwood forests and boasting many outstanding examples of ornate late nineteenth-century architecture, Eureka by the mid-twentieth century had attracted a vibrant and idiosyncratic community of artists, who were treated with tolerance by the largely working-class population.

Art historians generally have overlooked work done by Wong in Eureka. However, in paintings that he created there during the mid-1970s, he already revealed his fascination with run-down urban environments.