Sweet oblivion
Subtitle: the urban landscape of Martin Wong
By: [essays by] Marcia Tucker ... [et al.] ; edited by Amy Scholder.
Contributors: Cameron, Dan.; Scholder, Amy.; Illinois State University. University Galleries.; New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.)
Series: New Museum books ;; 1
Publisher: Rizzoli; Distributed by St. Martin's Press; Rizzoli International Publications, Incorporated
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 85
Subjects: Wong, Martin -- Exhibitions
Other titles: Urban landscape of Martin Wong
Description: The visionary paintings of Martin Wong, one of the unsung geniuses of New York's East Village art scene of the 1980s, are collected here and examined in depth for the first time.

Entirely self-taught, Wong creates intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages - customized manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs - sometimes within a single painting.

The urban landscape of Loisaida, the Hispanic section of the Lower East Side where Wong lives, is the source of his imagery. Whatever the theme - the survival of a neighborhood besieged by drugs and crime, homoerotic fantasies of men in uniform, the multiplicity of meaning in language, the kitsch and ornamentation of Chinatown USA - Wong's work is visually startling and movingly autobiographical.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 82) and index.
Catalog of an exhibition held at Illinois State University Galleries, Normal,Ill., Jan.13-Feb. 22, 1998 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, May 28-Sept. 13, 1998.