Martin Wong’s paintings combine painstaking documentary realism with highly charged symbols and decorative motifs. Wong moved from San Francisco to New York in 1978, joining a lively East Village scene filled with artists making political work inspired by their personal and cultural experiences. Illustrating a modern-day ruin in the epic scale of traditional history painting, Sweet Oblivion depicts a decaying tenement near the artist’s home and studio. Wong’s trademark hands in the upper left alight on the surface of a fiery, apocalyptic sky, reiterating the caption at the bottom of the composition in American Sign Language finger spelling. These delicately gilded characters—which pay homage to graffiti art, Persian script, and hieroglyphics—stand in stark contrast to the otherwise bleak scene. Illustrating a modern-day ruin with the epic scale of traditional history painting, Sweet Oblivion depicts a decaying tenement near the artist’s home and studio in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. The fortresslike buildings—made up of hundreds of minute, individually rendered bricks—are surrounded by a sea of refuse and rubble. Alighting on the surface of a fiery, apocalyptic sky, two groupings of Wong’s trademark hands reiterate the caption in American Sign Language finger spelling: “Sweet Oblivion, Clinton on the other side of Delancy Street.” Typical of Wong’s canvases, in which the harsh realities of urban life are offset with an uncommon optimism, the delicately gilded, stylized characters—which pay homage to graffiti art, Persian scripts, and hieroglyphics—appear here as emblems of beauty and hope in an otherwise bleak scene.
Date
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Courtesy of the Estate of Martin Wong and P.P.O.W. Gallery, NY
Extended information about this artwork
Lucy R. Lippard, Acts of Faith: Politics and the Spirit, exh. cat. (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Art Gallery, 1988), 6 (ill.), 7.
Dan Cameron and Amy Scholder, Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum Books; New York: Rizzoli, 1998), n.p., pl. 1 (color ill), 77.
Holland Cotter, “The Streets of a Crumbling El Dorado, Paved with Poetry and Desire,” New York Times, June 5, 1998, E35 (ill.).
Barry Schwabsky, “A City of Bricks and Ciphers,” Art in America, 86, no. 9 (September 1998): 103.
Martin Wong, “Martin Wong Meets Martin Wong,” Giant Robot (Summer 1999): 50.
Holland Cotter, “Art in Review,” New York Times, July 25, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/arts/design/25gall.html
Dean Daderko, curator for Visual AIDS, Side X Side, exh. cat. (New York: Visual AIDS; New York: La Mama La Galleria, 2008), n.p., cat 16 (color ill.).
Nate Cohan, “Everything Must Go: Martin Wong on His Turf,” ARTnews, March 13, 2014,
Doryun Chong and Cosmin Costinas, Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York , exh. cat. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 10, 113.
Andrew Strombeck, DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 83.
Krist Gruijthuijsen and Augustín Pérez Rubio, eds., Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, exh. cat. (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2022), 107 (color ill.).
“Martin Wong’s Sunset Park” featuring Barry Blinderman, Sotheby’s, May 20, 2022, video, 7:11, https://www.Sotheby’s.com/en/videos/martin-wongs-sunset-park.
Barry Blinderman, “Martin Wong’s Chains of Desire,” Evergreen Review, Spring/Summer 2022, https://evergreenreview.com/read/martin-wongs-chains-of-desire/.
Russell Ferguson, Bohemia: History of an Idea, 1950–2000, exh. cat. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023), 112, 115 (color ill.), 194.
New York, Bess Cutler Gallery, Situation, Jan. 14–Feb. 11, no cat.
New York, Semaphore Gallery, Martin Wong: Paintings for the Hearing Impaired, Sept. 8–Oct. 6, 1984, no cat.
Cleveland, OH, Cleveland State University, The Art Gallery, Acts of Faith: Politics and the Spirit, Jan. 8–Feb. 5, 1988, no cat. no.
Normal, IL, Illinois State University Galleries, Normal, Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong, Jan. 13–Feb. 22, 1998, pl. 1; New York, New Museum, May 28–Sept. 13, 1998.
New York, P.P.O.W Gallery, Big City Fall: Oiwa, Schneemann, Wojnarowicz, Wong, Nov. 30–Dec. 26, 2006, no cat.
New York, La MaMa La Galleria, Side X Side, June 28–Aug. 3, 2008, cat. 16.
Cologne, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Martin Wong: Works 1980–1998, no cat.; May 28–Aug. 22, 2010; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin, Aug.27–Sept. 25, 2010.
Art Institute of Chicago, Society for Contemporary Art 2012 Annual Acquisition Exhibition, May 7–Aug. 1, no cat.
Kunsthalle Prague, Bohemia: History of an Idea, 1950–2000, Mar. 23–Oct. 16, 2023, no cat. no.
The artist; sold through Semaphore Gallery, New York, to Rose and Morton Landowne, New York, 1984; sold through P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, to the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, given to the Art Institute of Chicago, Sept. 12, 2012.
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