| Yhteenveto: | Martin Wong & Other People follows the artist Martin Wong through his time in, and depictions of, four distinct social worlds: the California counterculture during the 1960s and early ‘70s, the provincial city of Eureka during the latter 1970s, New York City during the 1980s, and a historical rendering of San Francisco’s Chinatown largely undertaken in the 1990s. Wong uses his art to establish new personae that enabled integration into each setting while also accentuating the ways in which he remained an outsider. That Wong was a gay Chinese American living in a time of significant discrimination might suggest that the barriers to belonging were imposed from without, and this is always pertinent. However, the artist also exercised social and material power within the minoritarian worlds in which he worked and often laid bare the consequent asymmetry. While the questions raised by his paintings, sculptures, and poetry—the relationship between association and disassociation, being one-with and apart-from—are more often explored from the position of the marginalized subject, Wong opens them to a broader social matrix. In each period, he occupied simultaneous and conflicting positions of dominance and disempowerment, activating forms of social connection informed by tension, conflict, distance, and misunderstanding.
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