Tucked away at a small institution in Chicago is an eye-opening show by beloved New York artist Martin Wong, a self-taught artist of Chinese-American descent who recorded a bombed-out Lower East Side and heroized his Asian and Latino contemporaries who lived there. “Martin Wong: Chinatown USA,” at Wrightwood 659, also happens to include 11 never-before-exhibited paintings—a dozen if you include the never-before-seen back side of one large canvas. It’s a rare treat for lovers of the artist’s work.
The first monographic Wong institutional show in almost a decade features over 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs. It focuses on Wong’s investigations into the two Chinatowns he knew: San Francisco’s, where he was raised, and New York, where he lived from 1978 to 1994. One painting depicts in duplicate the distinctive pagoda-style building at 241 Canal Street in New York, while others represent pop icons like Bruce Lee and Peking opera performer Mei Lanfang. Cultural events like Chinese New Year parades come in for consideration, as do communities beloved to Wong, like graffiti painters and Puerto Rican poets.
The Chicago exhibition was complemented by a show, “Martin Wong: Popeye,” which closed June 6 at his New York gallery, P.P.O.W. His first New York solo in a decade, it was anchored by a suite of cutout paintings on wood representing Popeye in a red-brick pattern, motorized so that the cartoon character flexes his arms. (It was his sixth solo with the gallery; his 2024 and 2021 shows there were two-person exhibitions.)
“Martin Wong: Popeye,” at PPOW Gallery, New York, 2026.
Ian D. Edquist, courtesy PPOW
P.P.O.W also unveiled a monumental painting by Wong, Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo), 1982, at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025; it had been unseen for nearly four decades, and bore a $1.6 million asking price. That painting, dealing with his Asian American heritage and including a rare portrait of Wong’s mother and stepfather, went to the Broad Museum and is included in the Wrightwood show.
Martin Wong, Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo) 1982.
Courtesy PPOW Gallery, New York.
The opening gallery at Wrightwood 659, which introduces a number of the artist’s favored themes, like urban life, astrology, American Sign Language, graffiti, and skateboarding, brings an embarrassment of riches, with terrific works on loan from major institutions; lenders include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, the Broad, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
As independent curator Yasufumi Nakamori explains in the sumptuous catalog for the show, Wong was hesitant to show the Chinatown paintings, partly for fear of being stereotyped and partly because his parents discouraged him from showing them. Well into his career, Zully Adler writes in the catalog, Wong mounted the 1992 show “Chinatown USA” in New York. “This is an American Chinatown,” he told a reporter. “It has a touristy, kitschy feel. A pop feeling, and it’s not like anything in real China.” Wong brought fortune cookies to the opening, one of them reading “You will get an uncontrollable urge to buy a painting.”
The Wrightwood show has the added charm of being able to display some of Wong’s lovingly painted works depicting brick walls, on brick walls of its own, in its remarkable Tadao Ando–designed building. It’s a great touch.
“Martin Wong: Chinatown USA,” organized by independent curator Yasufumi Nakamori with Wrightwood 659 assistant curator Ashley Janke, is on view at Wrightwood 659, 659 West Wrightwood Avenue, through July 18, 2026.
Here are six of the never-before-exhibited works.
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Mark Twain, 1982
Image Credit: © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York. A factory building, complete with billowing chimneys and flying an American flag, is here improbably situated on a floating barge, specifically a paddle-wheel riverboat. An essay by art historian Margo Machida in the catalog notes that paddle-wheel-driven steamships appear in port scenes of 19th-century Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong by Chinese trade painters. Twain vocally criticized Western involvement in China, and his work was broadly circulated in the country, so Wong may well have known about Twain’s anti-imperialist positions, Machida writes.
At top right is a cameo of the American writer Mark Twain (born Samuel Longhorn Clemens). The ship is named the Mark Twain in one inscription; Machida notes that there was a craft by that name at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, “a working reproduction of the nineteenth-century paddle-wheeled steamboats that transported people and goods along the length of the Mississippi River.” Another inscription, in Chinese characters, reads “Mississippi Riverboat Theater Mai-ting.”
The shapes of the waves and the details of the boat derive from Japanese and Chinese referents respectively, notes Machida. What’s more, Wong included in the boat an architectural motif from a noodle factory, and, in the decorative scheme on the boat, included a cartoonish version of a Chinese mythical beast characterized by gluttony.
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Blue Beard the Pirate, 1982
Image Credit: © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York. Here, Wong curiously combines two folkloric references. Bluebeard, a character out of French folktales, is a wealthy man who murders his wives, one after another. Wong depicts him in the costume of a typical Chinese opera performer. In Chinese characters appears the message “Bluebeard the pirate and his sailors perform the evil dance/Hundreds of fish leap on the ocean like silver dollars.” But Bluebeard is not a pirate; Blackbeard is, though, points out Zully Adler, the director of Northern California’s Further Triennial, in the catalog, adding, “Maybe Wong wanted to double his references, intensify the malevolence, and then dress them up as Chinese.”
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Verso of Untitled (Silver Storefront), n.d.
Image Credit: © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York. The curator sees in this long-hidden work as a lovely metaphor for Wong’s hesitation to show his Chinatown works. The painting shows a rolled-down and locked security grate. On its reverse, exhibited to great effect at Wrightwood 659, is a rendition of Wong in the guise of Chung Kuei (aka Zhong Kui), a Taoist deity, shown with bulging eyes in Peking opera makeup, carrying a palette and brushes, just like the self-representation in his 1982 painting Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo). With an assist from five small demons, he presents his work to two women in a gallery identified on the storefront as Chung Kuei Art Studio. The checkered floor and paintings of Magic 8 Balls and dice mark this as a scene from an American Chinatown, writes the curator. Upstairs, meanwhile, several artists work at their easels.
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Lex Shan Gay Loo: 64, 1992.
Image Credit: © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York. This painting appears to reproduce the sign on a building at 64 Bayard Street in New York, spelling out the titular words from the sign in American Sign Language (a sign, translated into sign language, is a delightful Wong twist). The Wong catalogue raisonné notes only that the business was founded in 1947.
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Co-dependent No More, ca. 1992.
Image Credit: © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York. Shang and early Western Zhou ritual bronzes often bear the doubled image of an animal “mask” (or taotie) with bulging eyes and curved horns, editor Mark Dean Johnson points out in the catalog. Two men in vests, apparently Chinatown waiters, press their heads together, such that their faces form the semblance of a broad face. About this motif, Johnson points out that Wong once described his painting Big Heat (1986–88), showing two kissing firemen, as actually showing “Siamese twins joined at the mouth.” They hold before them a Magic 8 Ball, one of Wong’s favored motifs. At the painting’s bottom is its title, with “codependent” misspelled, a frequent occurrence in Wong’s paintings.
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Chop Suey Sundae, 1992
Image Credit: © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York. Neon signs advertising a sundae with almond cookies appear atop signs for various Chinatown establishments, including nightclubs Jade Palace and the Chinese Pagoda, in an arrangement that appears in a 1946 photo of Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown reproduced in the catalogue.
In the foreground are two tuxedoed men with faces that recall Daikoku, an incarnation of Shiva, the Hindu god of war, and a popular Japanese deity of commerce and wealth, as the curator describes in the catalog. They, too, jointly hold a Magic 8 Ball, a symbol for Wong of “the unpredictable nature of life, love, or luck.” Their gestures recall hand gestures often seen in images of the Buddha. Blue creatures with bulging eyes surround them, seemingly emerging from the deep blue background.
