MARTIN WONG

(1946-1999)

Meyer's Hotel
1980-1981

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1986


"Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live and the people are the people I know and see all the time."
-Martin Wong, circa 1980s-1990s

A seminal masterwork from pioneering New York artist Martin Wong, Meyer's Hotel, (1980-1981), is one of the most important works by the artist to ever appear at auction. Incorporating Wong's key iconography and highly personal elements of his life and experience, this painting presents a singular occasion to acquire a momentous work by an artist whose historical significance and ground-breaking impact on 20th Century American art is still yet to be fully recognized.

Raised in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, Wong studied ceramics and was an active member of the Bay Area art scene as a performance artist and portraitist. In the late 1970s, he moved to New York, settling in the Lower East Side and turning his practice exclusively to painting. Upon his move to Manhattan in 1978, Wong became immersed in downtown culture, living in the Meyer's Hotel on Stanton Street where he worked as a night porter for four years.

Wong had a rich and multifaceted life, and recent reassessments have recognized him as an emblematic figure and pioneering icon for many different communities and social dynamics. The artist struggled with his own identity however, and history has labored to categorize this complex figure who stood outside many of the communities he sympathized with. A Chinese-American, Wong was born in Oregon and did not read Chinese. After moving to the Lower East Side, he formed close ties with members of the predominantly Latino and African American communities of the neighborhood. Though not culturally connected to them, his work was heavily influenced by the Puerto-Rican style he admired and was surrounded by. Openly gay, Wong lived and worked during the AIDS crisis, and it was from complications of the virus that lead to his untimely demise at the age of only fifty-three. Sympathizing with communities even far outside his usual milieu, Wong particularly sympathized with those who struggled to communicate, specifically the deaf and mute, going so far as to learn American Sign Language.

Wong's visionary realism and singular iconography was unique in the heyday of the East Village. He was inspired by tabloid coverage of the serial killer Son of Sam, and his instantly recognizable use of sign language referenced not only street gang signals, but secret codes for the homosexual community, of which he was a member. His "uniquely representational imagery encompassed the urban environment, the history and stereotypes of Chinatown, and homoerotic content" and its revolutionary nature has only become clearer over time (Martin Wong Foundation, www.martinwong.org).

Wong was an essential figure in the vibrant and energetic East Village art scene, collaborating and mentoring many of the most influential artists of the time including Keith Haring, Rammellzee and Futura. He made a significant contribution to the emerging graffiti scene in the 1980s, considering it to be the final significant art movement of the 20th Century. An established collector of graffiti art himself, Wong co-founded the Museum of American Graffiti in the East Village in 1989, and his collection has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. A devoted and passionate advocate of the movement from the start, Wong's influence on street art, and on counter-culture as a whole, is immeasurable.

Wong was a truly singular artist whose unique visionary realism is on full display in Meyer's Hotel. The work depicts Wong's first New York apartment, viewed through two windows, adding a layer of voyeurism that locates the viewer firmly in the dense proximity of tenement life. The artist's obsessive painting of trompe l'oeil bricks lend the illusion of texture and age to the down-and-out hotel, identified with a caption above the window. Meyer's Hotel draws inspiration from Vincent van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, (1888), with the artist's works in progress decorating the walls of a lonely studio interior. Two of Wong's own works can be identified in this bedroom. Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball, (1978), hangs on the wall behind the headboard and to its right is Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder, (1980). Painted in this very bedroom, the title of the work is spelt out in visual gestures and is the first work of Wong's to incorporate American Sign Language. Meyer's Hotel is one of two very similar compositions of exterior views into Wong's room at the hotel. The other is a well-exhibited work created at the same moment, entitled My Secret World, (1978 - 1981).

Meyer's Hotel presents the artist's state of mind in those early days in New York, featuring eight-balls and dice, a jar of pencils, a coffee cup and stacked trunks and suitcases. Atop the dresser is an array of books with generic titles such as Pro Hockey, Muhammed Ali, Unbeatable Bruce Lee and Tattoos. Wong's background in art and knowledge of his art historical predecessors shines through. Alongside the Van Gogh influenced composition, a Guston-esque jar of pencils sits askew on the windowsill. Philip Guston is recalled in many of these early paintings of the Lower East Side's urban deterioration, where faded advertising often appears alongside crumbling brick facades.

One of the most remarkable and visionary artists of the late 20th Century, Martin Wong's work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the de Young Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the New York Historical Society. Retrospectives of his work took place at New York's New Museum in 1998 and the Bronx Museum, New York, in 2015.