UC Riverside

The scholarship on Martin Wong is marked by ideals of belonging and community, with his mother and friends being the major proponents in the posthumous dissemination of his art. The literature splinters the artist into distinct periods: 70s counterculture, 80s New York, 90s Chinatowns, etc. Yet, Wong’s identity and practice evade these neat and tidy classifications, often marked by ambiguity and a self-fashioning to navigate a conditional inclusion into communities. Visible tensions between the self and community within the artist’s artworks–a secret Chinatown painting and a lack of depicted eroticism after a diagnosis with AIDS–reveal that the artist’s practice extended his social belonging. By reconciling the scholarship with the discursivity of images, I understand the contradictory and paradoxical nature of Wong’s images as negotiating identities to navigate communities: immediate family, neighbors, friends, and the art market. This navigation illuminates how this insistence on belonging as a process of working-towards can perpetuate communion amidst hostile sociohistorical contexts.