Martin Wong

Martin Wong: Human Instamatic will be the first museum retrospective of the work of Chinese-American painter Martin Wong (1946-1999) since his untimely death. This project gains momentum from recent exhibitions examining Wong as a collector and source of inspiration for contemporary artists: City as Canvas (Museum of the City of New York, 2014); Dahn Vo, I M U U R 2 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013); and Taiping Tianguo: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2012; and e-flux, NY, 2014). In contrast, Human Instamatic will offer the first in-depth assessment of Wong’s formal contributions as a painter, placing his work in line with such 20th-century painters as Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel, both renowned for their insightful portraits of the communities in which they lived. Co-curated by Sergio Bessa and Yasmin Ramirez, the exhibition will feature over 100 of Wong’s paintings with rarely-seen archival materials from the Martin Wong Papers at the Fales Library of New York University.

Event website