Fig. 1. Martin Wong, Cell Door Slot, 1986. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. © Martin Wong Foundation.
Fig. 2. Martin Wong, Penitentiary Fox, 1988. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. © Martin Wong Foundation.
But how can one think these apparently diametrically opposed readings of Wong’s white together? How may one causally or otherwise fold a space of erotic potential onto a critique of white power? And is it indeed true that simply because the interiors and outfits are white, they “conjure” and facilitate this erotic dream space? What if they rather inhibit it?
We may want to start with reading the instances where white does not only cover the walls, but also envelops the inmates themselves. This is most prominent in the intimate portraits, including Portrait of Mickey Piñero Tattooing (ca. 1988), Portrait of Mickey Piñero (1988), and Untitled (Portrait of Man in White Shirt Sleeping) (1990). Rubio suggests that “[t]he white background of the clouds that surround both paintings situate Piñero in a reformatory or jail, in keeping with the atmospheres used by Wong in other penitentiary environments.”[9] I suggest that we are not dealing here merely with “atmosphere.”
Furthermore, whiteness in Wong’s work is not limited to carceral institutions. Cases in point are Iglesia Pentecostal (1986), where a church is rendered in white, including a prominent white metal grating; Creedmoor Psychiatric Center (1987), an imposing mental institution also fully painted in white; and the threatening secure white compound of 47-04 (1992). Significantly, none of these paintings suggest any “erotic potential” despite the presence of the color supposedly associated with it. It is therefore perhaps too limiting to speak of whiteness purely in terms of the racism of the carceral system. We may have to expand this to an analysis of Wong’s implicit critique of the various institution(s) of whiteness itself.
Against this backdrop, the complexity of how Wong, also known as “Chino Malo,” identified with and othered the community of Nuyorican men that formed his immediate social context is in my view less relevant than the fact that at no point in his painting career white men become an object of desire.[10] We find Latino prisoners, Black boxers, and Asian martial arts professionals, but no white men. Indeed, Getsy suggests that “[t]hroughout his work, Wong made an ardent attempt to bridge perceived differences, and his paintings and poems relay his affections and identifications with other people and communities of color.”[11] Rather than being an “unreal and dreamlike space of erotic potential,” whiteness signifies the absence of any such potential, an absence as oppressive as the giant backdrop of Untitled (Two Firemen with Boxers) (ca. 1985), or indeed the “shroud” worn in the Sacred Shroud of Pepe Turcel (1990) (Fig. 3), covering his brown skin and tattoos. For Wong, whiteness has no affirmative erotic potential, even as it tries to discipline and erase subjects of color. His white is the whiteness of correction fluid.
Fig. 3. Martin Wong, Sacred Shroud of Pepe Turcel, 1990. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. © Martin Wong Foundation.
Who is doing the desiring in the work of Martin Wong? An Asian American man desiring other men of color, men of color desiring each other. There appears no desire to become white, a desire so often present among immigrant communities. There is a desire for coloredness, to become differently colored, if you will. In the entirety of Wong’s universe, whiteness is absent as an affirmative erotic force, and in this sense this universe is properly utopian. Wong also appears uninterested in the trappings of whiteness. When he appears in photographs, he dons jeans and cowboy boots, with shoulder-long hair. What has been characterized as fetishization or, rather derogatorily, a “playful form of posturing and belonging to”[12] communities of color—or as Roy Pérez suggests, a “brown commons”[13]—is in fact, I would argue, a disinterest in whiteness. This gesture makes Wong’s oeuvre stand out also within Asian American cultural production, which in general has struggled with and against the white gaze.[14] Rather than seeing him as an Asian Tom of Finland,[15] whose massive oeuvre contains barely a single Asian subject. Wong’s work is more readily read together with the work of Sadao Hasegawa, for instance. The work of this contemporaneous Japanese gay artist incorporated Thai, Tibetan, and Balinese mythologies and subjects,[16] and likewise featured signage and typography, producing an oeuvre that, just like Wong’s, disregards the white gaze.
Wong’s slow uptake in the European museum world, as the curators indicate,[17] may be interpreted along the same lines: The western museum is the quintessential white space, an inversion of Wong’s white prisons and institutions that does not serve for the conditioning or correction of the colored other, but rather functions as a place to “provide respite to those seeking to reaffirm their understanding of the racial social order”: a “white sanctuary.”[18] Wong’s is thus a body of work that in its rendering of whiteness as opaque, oppressive institutionality actively criticizes and undermines the museum space – and yet here we are, at Martin Wong’s retrospective inside the white walls of the Stedelijk Museum.
This then brings me, finally, to the title of the exhibition: Malicious Mischief. Despite the claim of the curators that the exhibition is “named after a series of significant eponymous works from 1991–98 that broadly represent the concept of the ‘outlaw,’ which Wong embraced and fetishized,”[19] the series referred to was in fact produced in 1997–98 in collaboration with graffiti artist LA2. It is unclear to me whether the Latino figures depicted in this series as simply enjoying their life indeed should be deemed “outlaws” for that reason alone or whether this appellation originates in the fantasy of the curators. What is clear to me, however, is that two earlier paintings from 1991 with the same title have an entirely different subject matter that certainly does not fit the category of “outlaws”: prison wardens, the only type of white figure appearing in Wong’s later paintings. In the light of the above, one of those two paintings may very well be a more appropriate lens through which to read the exhibition title, in the sense that it precisely represents the curatorial gaze inside the cultural institution.
Malicious Mischief (1991) (Fig. 4) shows a police officer in blue uniform, with the all-caps text “MALICIOUS MISCHIEF” in the upper left corner. We are not dealing here with the complex maldad of Chino Malo;[20] the mischief this officer is engaged in has nothing of the tenderness with which Paco proposed to Cupcake. The upper part of his face is cropped by the frame.[21] In a strange presentiment of the future, this particular framing yields the archetypical Grindr profile image of the toxic top: “masc4masc, no fats, no femmes, no asians.” The officer’s left hand is holding a cigarette, the smoke offsetting his body against the white prison walls. His right hand is grabbing his crotch, or has perhaps already found its way inside his underwear.
Fig. 4. Martin Wong, Malicious Mischief, 1991. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. © Martin Wong Foundation.
It is remarkable that the exhibition references this painting’s title, as it so clearly portrays the white gaze, absent and outside the frame, as it masturbates to Wong’s oeuvre. The “Department [of] Correction[s]” badge on his right shoulder emphasizes the disciplinary nature of this white institutional gaze, which cannot be returned. It is here to set the record straight. This is the gaze that can judge an oeuvre a “key example of the countercultural scenes,”[22] “once nearly overlooked by the art establishment,”[23] or simply that of an “outsider.”[24] I do not quote curators and art critics here in order to undermine their work, but to indicate how the white gaze—especially when reinforced by the white instutional walls of the museum—imposes its particular frame precisely in order to avoid dealing with the obvious fact that the work of Wong is thoroughly disinterested in what or how that gaze judges.
About the Author
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is director of queer-led open access press punctum books and open metadata platform Thoth and member of the Stedelijk Studies editorial board. He writes about various things, including medieval Nubia and contemporary art, and is the English translator of gay manga artist Gengoroh Tagame.
[1] I thank Michel Pierre Laffite for his generous comments on an early draft of this paper, and Charl Landvreugd for asking me to write it.
[2] See David J. Getsy, “Bricks and Jails: On Martin Wong’s Queer Fantasies,” in Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, exh. cat. (Cologne: Walther und Franz König, 2022), 182.
[3] Indeed, a few lines later Getsy states that “The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero sanctifies its frank depiction of same-gender desire and elevates its protagonists.” Ibid.
[4] The rose is absent from the repainting Cupcake and Paco (Corot) (1987–88).
[5] Tiernan Morgan, “The Intimate Visions of Martin Wong, Loisaida’s ‘Chino-Latino’ Painter,” Hyperallergic, January 15, 2016.
[6] Agustín Pérez Rubio, “…it’s not really what you think: Martin Wong and the Recreation of the Sociopolitical Landscape of Loisaida,” in Martin Wong, 140–41. My emphasis.
[7] Getsy, “Bricks and Jails,” 182. My emphasis
[8] Ibid., 186.
[9] Pérez Rubio, “…it’s not really what you think,” 146.
[10] “Wong’s desirous proximity to latinidad is never about fixing it or about his becoming Latino. It is more nearly a way for him to extend poetic reach from his position at the frame of a cultural archive of which he is a constitutive part in a material way.” Roy Pérez, “The Glory That Was Wrong: El ‘Chino Malo’ Approximates Nuyorico,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 25, no. 3 (2015): 295.
[11] Getsy, “Bricks and Jails,” 185.
[12] Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez Rubio, “Introductory Note,” in Martin Wong, 19.
[13] Pérez, “The Glory That Was Wrong,” 287.
[14] See, for example, Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
[15] For example, Matthew Shen Goodman speaks of Wong’s “lusty approach that, at times, seems equal parts Tom of Finland and Robert Crumb.” Goodman, “Martin Wong,” Frieze, January 31, 2016. In fact, Wong’s Clones of Bruce Lee (1992) could be read as a direct rebuttal of Tom of Finland’s famous “clones.”
[16] See Gengoroh Tagame, Gay Erotic Art in Japan, Vol. 2: Transitions of Gay Fantasies in the Times (Tokyo: POT Publishing Co., 2006), 194.
[17] Gruijthuijsen and Pérez Rubio, “Introductory Note,” 19.
[18] See David G. Embrick, Simón Weffer, and Silvia Dómínguez, “White Sanctuaries: Race and Place in Art Museums,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 39, no. 11–12 (2019): 995–1009.
[19] Gruijthuijsen and Pérez Rubio, “Introductory Note,” 19.
[20] Pérez, “The Glory That Was Wrong,” 278.
[21] In a certain way the painting is the inverse of Cell Door Slot, where nothing but the gaze is present.
[22] Gruijthuijsen and Pérez Rubio, “Introductory Note,” 19.
[23] Karl Cole, “Pride Month 2021 I: Martin Wong,” Davis Art, June 1, 2021.
[24] Andrew Russeth, “Big Heat: The Bronx Museum Champions the Brave, Unflinching Martin Wong,” ARTnews, November 6, 2015.
