Martin Wong’s paintings of New York’s Lower East Side define his career to many. He lived and worked in the neighborhood for more than 10 years, long after his success would have allowed him to leave for tonier surroundings. He felt at home collaborating with the area’s Nuyorican poets and graffiti artists.

Far less recognized are Wong’s Chinatown- and Asia-inspired paintings, drawings, and sculptures created throughout his career.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Wong (1946-1999) grew up in San Francisco near Chinatown. His Chinese-born father died when the artist was four years old. Wong was raised by his Chinese American mother and Chinese Mexican American stepfather. Martin Wong considered himself Chino-Latino.

He did not grow up speaking Chinese. He never even visited China or Hong Kong.

That doesn’t mean the culture, the place, and its people didn’t impact him. Wong was fascinated by Chinatowns: San Francisco and New York.

In 1993, his downtown Manhattan gallery, P·P·O·W, hosted an exhibition of his “Chinatown USA” series paintings. Fantastical, lusciously colored artworks filled with exacting detail, mysterious faces, dragons, and laundries. A mix of the artist’s observation and imagination. Wong explored these spaces—filled with Asian art and architecture as adopted in the United States amid the explosion of street culture in San Francisco and New York in the late 20th century—as amalgams of memory, identity, and queer and pop-culture narratives.

On April 17, 2026, Wrightwood 659 in Chicago opens “Martin Wong: Chinatown USA,” a presentation focusing on this underexplored through-line in the artist’s practice: his fascination with Asia through Chinatowns as personal, mythical cityscapes.

“The Chinatown works, Martin did not show them until 1993–little late–he passed away in 1999; it's not that the Chinatown paintings were painted the year before ’93, his interest in Chinatown and Asian art really emerged starting in the late ‘70s,” Wrightwood 659 exhibition curator Yasufumi Nakamori told me during a video interview. “His parents discouraged him to show those paintings about Chinatown because they felt Martin could be stereotyped as an artist who makes work about China. He was Chinese American. He was kind of ambivalent about showing those works.”

This helps explain why the extraordinary paintings haven’t been more celebrated. Until now.

Wrightwood 659’s show documents Wong’s lifelong fascination with the streets, storefronts, nightlife, myths, art, and celebrations of Chinatowns.

“He was able to get the sense of what life was like in China by visiting Chinatowns,” Nakamori said.

“Chinatown USA” features more than 100 paintings, drawings, ceramic works, and photo collages, complemented by videos and artifacts, including pre-modern Asian objects collected by Wong. Several works reflect his interest in American Sign Language, calligraphy, and graffiti.

Wong built one of the premiere collections of early 80s New York graffiti art. The Museum of the City of New York exhibited it during a critically acclaimed show in 2024-25. How street writing might have influenced his interest in calligraphy and vice versa proves intriguing.

“Chinatown USA” Highlights

Wong claimed his view of Chinatown was like that of an outsider. His paintings delight in exoticism.

Chinese New Year’s Parade (1992-94) depicts a near-psychedelic extravaganza with Wong as a small boy facing a tsunami of demons, a towering dragon, and Peking Opera performers. In Canal Street (1992), the pagoda-styled building at Canal and Centre Streets metamorphoses into a fantasia of calligraphed signs, red columns, green-tiled eaves, and an impossibly saturated blue sky.

Wong moves back and forth between East Coast and West Coast.

“The exhibition starts with an iconic Chinese pagoda, it's a postmodern building that still stands at the corner of Center Street and Canal Street in New York City. It's distinctly New York City Chinatown,” Nakamori said. In another painting he shows, “the corner of Grand Avenue in San Francisco, you can tell right away. A certain school which exists in San Francisco Chinatown.”

Wong also created densely layered paintings of iconic Asian pop-culture heroes such as Bruce Lee. Shortly after moving to New York’s Lower East Side—and inspired by Lee’s influence on youth culture—he painted Clones of Bruce Lee (1982).

That painting, and others on view at Wrightwood 659, including Chinese New Year’s Parade, can be seen in the remarkable video below from the Museum of Modern Art with footage of the artist taken inside his Lower East Side studio.

A long-unseen painting, off view for nearly 40 years and on loan from The Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo) (1982), portrays the artist’s mother and stepfather—nude—in the center of a triptych echoing the format of a European religious altarpiece. The 12-foot-wide artwork exemplifies Wong’s practice of inserting himself, family members, and his friends into his art.

In Chinese Laundry: A Portrait of the Artist’s Parents (1984), Wong places his Californian parents inside a classic New York Chinese laundry. They smile from behind a storefront meticulously detailed with brow n paper shirt packages, neatly tied laundry bags, a wall calendar, a clock, and a clothes press.

The earliest work in the show is a photograph from 1958 taken when Wong was 12 years old.

“It's a black and white photograph of (San Francisco) Chinatown, Jade Palace Cocktails Restaurant,” Nakamori explains. “It's almost like a film noir shot from a lower angle, he’s a boy, but that particular nightscape appears again, again, again in his later painting.”

The year after his 1993 “Chinatowns USA” show, Wong was diagnosed with AIDS. He returned to San Francisco where he continued to paint until the day before his death from complications in 1999 at the age of 53.

“Martin Wong: Chinatown USA” can be seen through July 18. 2026.

Chicago Chinatown

Wrightwood 659 calls Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood home. Chicago has a Chinatown as well, although Wong never painted it. Chicago-based artist Zoe Chen is using art to ensure the voices of her city’s Chinatown residents there are not lost in the neighborhood’s transformation.

Her zine Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going documents the everyday stories of Chinatown residents navigating neighborhood expansion and gentrification. Chicago’s Chinatown, home to nearly a third of the city’s Chinese population, is one of the few in North America that is growing

By blending art, history, and social impact, Chen offers an intimate look at how a community preserves tradition while confronting rapid change.

The publication is available at Chicago’s Evoke Gallery, Western Exhibitions gallery, and Quimby’s bookstore.

Martin Wong In New York

P·P·O·W continues representing Wong’s estate. On view from April 18 through May 30, 2026, at the gallery, “Martin Wong: Popeye,” represents the gallery’s sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work, and the first solo show of Martin Wong in New York in over a decade.

“Popeye” examines Wong’s lifelong preoccupation with artistic subcultures—namely comic book illustration and early tattoo imagery—as reoccurring motifs in his lexicon of images and symbols. In so doing, the presentation brings together disparate bodies of work created over three decades of Wong’s career, highlighting another underexplored throughline in Wong’s output equally indebted to lowbrow comix as the highbrow associations of Asian and European art histories.

Anchoring the exhibition is a suite of larger-than-life Popeye cutouts. Created between 1989-97, and intended to be motorized, a pair of Popeye cutouts was exhibited only once during the artist’s time.

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