“We know how much of sexuality there is in all cruelties, tortures, beatings.”
—Frantz Fanon
“Abolition requires we change one thing: everything.”
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore
I first saw Martin Wong’s prison paintings when I visited a two-person exhibition of Wong and the contemporary painter Aaron Gilbert at PPOW Gallery in 2021. Five of them were included in the show. I was there to see the Wong I knew and loved: the painter of fiery bricks, kissing firemen, pastel skies, and astral poetry. Wong is best known for his paintings of the Lower East Side in the 1980s and ’90s, his adopted neighborhood. New York through his eyes was an abandoned ruin, built up with bricks so bright they seemed to speak of magma, promising a glimpse of the heat within the earth. The wreckage of those hardscrabble days was not something to be mourned. The gaps in Wong’s skylines are where we glimpse the stars, the finger-spelling hands, and their enigmatic messages. I didn’t know very much about him then, but still I felt a kinship with him: he was Asian, gay, and had roots in San Francisco, where I grew up. More than that, I identified with the searing loneliness and longing I saw in his city paintings. As was my habit, I photographed my favorite works in the show. My pictures from that day attest to my desire to be intimate with them. There’s a close-up shot of Sharp & Dottie (1984), bricks extending to the edges of the frame, the titular couple dwarfed by their expanse. But I didn’t take any pictures of the prison paintings. They didn’t pierce the surface of my attention in the same way. My intuition did not mark them, at the time, as worthy of memory or replication.
Martin Wong, Penitentiary Fox, 1988. Copyright Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York.
In contrast to the iron-oxide reds and rusts of Wong’s city paintings, his prison paintings are dominated by pallid grays and institutional beige. Despite this austere palette, their imagery recalls both Christian iconography and the lowbrow sexuality of gay pulp. They are most often interpreted through his close relationship with the Nuyorican poet and playwright Miguel Piñero, whose time in prison informed his 1974 play Short Eyes. Piñero was pictured in one of the paintings in the show; Penitentiary Fox (1988), made shortly after his death, shows the poet with his eyes closed, tenderly dreaming the world of his play into existence. Other paintings were much starker. Cell Door Slot (ca. 1984–86), for instance, shows only the eyes of an incarcerated person (or perhaps a guard) through a rectangular aperture. Many works are implicated in the representation of what Hortense J. Spillers calls “captured sexualities”: most have a romantic or an erotic quality, and most depict Black or brown men. Some show prisoners reclining behind bars in poses that recall odalisque paintings; others contain bars of soap, referencing a dirty joke. In Lock-Up (1985), the viewer surveils a sleeping man, surrounded by pinup porn, through the bars of his cell. 47-04 (1992) is the most mysterious of them all. It depicts the exterior walls of a prison, marked with surveillance cameras and a watchtower. In the corner, four UFOs hover over the structure. The sky is dark and starless—rare within Wong’s oeuvre. Instead of proliferating constellations, there is only a stamp of the painting’s title, the Queensboro Correctional Facility’s street address in Long Island City.
The gallery gave out free double-sided posters to visitors of the show. One side featured Gilbert’s painting while the other reproduced Wong’s Prison Bunk Beds (ca. 1988–91), depicting dark-skinned men lying face down on a metal bunk bed. The men are nearly identical and interchangeable, and the bunk bed seems to extend indefinitely upward and downward. It is difficult to locate any romance, humor, or desire in this scene. I hung the poster in my room with Gilbert’s painting facing out and Wong’s facing the wall. The poster moved with me from New York to Providence, Rhode Island, from a summer sublet to a room on campus, from apartment to apartment. Wong’s image of the prison continued to face the wall, a constant presence in my domestic space, what Frank B. Wilderson III calls a “(silent) scandal” largely unseen and unthought. I remember wishing the gallery had chosen a better image for the poster.
A year later, when I went looking for a critical “problem” I could write about for my BA thesis, I found one on the walls of my bedroom. I realized that my initial indifference toward Wong’s image had deepened into intractable ambivalence. That first encounter with the paintings in 2021 was less than a year after the George Floyd rebellions had brought racialized state violence and the movement for its abolition to the forefront of national consciousness. I had just begun working in museums and was trying to understand the relationships between cultural institutions and penal institutions, between images of violence and its perpetuation, between loving art and hating the art world. Martin Wong is one of the first artists I loved, and one of the first I really felt ambivalent about.
This felt like a solitary condition, at least at first. As I started to research Wong, I grew frustrated with the hagiographic and overfamiliar tendencies of the writing about him. It felt like many people wanted to claim him as a queer or Asian ancestor, as an emblem of downtown alterity, or a predecessor to contemporary figurative painting. The claims staked on Wong’s legacy seemed symptomatic of a kind of doomed love—a feeling not so different, perhaps, from the enclosed, criminal longing that I saw pictured in his prison paintings. But in the back of my mind, I knew that I wasn’t immune to the interference of my own desires and projections. Why was I claiming him, and what was I claiming him for?
On April 13, 1984, five months before his first official solo exhibition at Semaphore Gallery in New York, Martin Wong showed his paintings in a more casual venue: his neighbor’s apartment, two floors down. To my knowledge, only one image exists of this early show of Wong’s paintings of Rikers Island, a casual snapshot of five canvases hung together in a dense constellation. Unlike the city paintings Wong debuted later that year, these works have no bricks, no words, no stars, and no sky. Instead of opening into endless expanses, they are narrowly framed and small in scale. Rather than giving bodies room to find one another, the works show figures jammed together in—to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s description of chattel slavery and its afterlife—a “dense nexus of terror and enjoyment.” Three of the canvases show a series of violent sexual encounters between a dark-skinned person who is incarcerated and uniformed corrections officers. The violated figure takes up much of the frame: his face is turned away, but he is otherwise allowed no privacy. The remaining two canvases are less explicit. In one, someone peers out at us from a cell-door slot; the other is a similar but unpeopled composition. If in Wong’s city paintings, iron would be oxidized into blazing flames of desire, here it was alloyed into something far less yielding.
The model of the prisoner in these paintings is Aaron Goodstone, known as Sharp, a graffiti artist whom Wong befriended and whose work he collected. When Sharp visited the show, he felt violated by his depiction and confiscated several of the canvases. There are contradictory accounts of this exchange, which was uncovered by the shared labors of artist-curators Julie Ault and Danh Vo. In Ault’s telling, Sharp confronted Wong and, following their conversation, returned two of the three paintings he had taken. According to a leaflet produced for one of Vo’s exhibitions in 2019, Sharp destroyed two canvases, keeping only a “scrap.” What is clear is that he felt violated enough by the assemblage that he destroyed it—first by taking the canvases off the wall and then by physically destroying some of them. One of the paintings I saw at PPOW, Cell Door Slot, seems to be the only canvas that is extant as a standalone work; another painting is incorporated into the multi-panel work Mintaka (1990). The violence of Sharp’s portrayal was something that Wong acknowledged, albeit offhandedly, during a lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. “I think after a while it gave him psychological problems, so he told me to stop painting him,” Wong told the audience. “When he hit twenty-four he told me it was a violation of his personality. I stopped painting him for about three months. Then he went to Europe and I started painting him again.”
Wong went on to produce roughly twenty more prison paintings and several related paintings of police over the next fifteen years, despite the antagonism that greeted the series’s debut. He finished the last of these just a year before his death from AIDS-related illness in 1999. Over the course of my thesis work, I wrote tens of thousands of words trying to account for this body of work. I followed it—and Wong—everywhere: to the site of his former home and studio, to his archived sketches and clippings at New York University, to Berlin for his traveling retrospective in 2023. I even visited his urn in San Francisco. The intention of my research was to stage a series of encounters between Wong’s prison paintings and concurrent historical events and bodies of critical thought. I wanted to read the paintings in a dutifully materialist fashion: against the background of America’s late-twentieth-century prison-building boom and related forces of Black revolt, uneven urban development, and neoliberal transformation. Yet, everywhere I went, the paintings managed to evade me.
The New York that Wong moved to in the late 1970s was in the throes of what scholars have called its “long default” or “long crisis.” In the wake of deindustrialization and, more immediately, the city’s default to its creditors in 1975, New York became a laboratory for policies that were later named as examples of neoliberalism. Organized abandonment and austerity remade New York by displacing working-class residents and subsequently inviting gentrification. In Wong’s city paintings, the landscape of disinvestment—closed gates, crumbling walls, and burned-out skeletons of buildings—is a site of proliferating mischief, desire, and love. But sometimes, in Wong’s city, there are blocks or bars where windows should be. They are rendered in the same muddy gray as his prison paintings: eruptions of the carceral within the city.
Martin Wong, Malicious Mischief, 1991. Copyright Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York.
Across the United States, prisons and police have been a common way of dealing with surplus populations created by deindustrialization—a “fix” that also addressed the crises of surplus finance capital, surplus land in rural areas, and surplus state capacity. “As a class, convicts are deindustrialized cities’ working or workless poor,” writes the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Golden Gulag, her landmark account of California’s prison boom. The gentrifying city and industrial-scale prison are spaces produced by a common system and a common crisis. Abolitionist scholars like Gilmore and Mike Davis, along with groups like Critical Resistance, began to use the term “prison-industrial complex” to name how carceral power extends far beyond the physical footprint of prisons themselves. I tried to understand Wong’s body of work as a map of connections between urban and carceral space. These connections are often literal: the artists Wong met in his immediate neighborhood provided the material for his prison paintings. One can follow the likenesses of Piñero and Sharp as they move from the prison to the city and back again. One can also read, beneath the proliferating walls and apertures of Wong’s cityscapes, the ghost of an inverse city represented by newly constructed prisons. His ruined city, poignantly lonely, bears witness not only to the displacement of residents through eviction but also their forced disappearance by the justice system.
I also tried to read the paintings in the shadow of Black radicalism and its repression—an ongoing sequence of events that Orisanmi Burton calls the “long Attica revolt.” The Black movements of the 1960s were met with brutal state force, leading to imprisonment of revolutionaries like Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and George Jackson. Their writings from prison, along with a series of uprisings that culminated in the takeover of (and subsequent massacre at) Attica Correctional Facility in 1971, sharpened awareness of the prison’s centrality within the racial capitalist order. These events resonated widely across politics and culture. Within the visual arts, for instance, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition commissioned dozens of artists to respond to the rebellion, culminating in the 1972 publication Attica Book. Notably, Wong’s personal library contains a copy of the investigative report commissioned by New York State after the massacre, among many other prison-related books and articles. As Burton argues, we still live in the counterinsurgent aftermath of the riot. Sexualized violence and torture were foundational to this repression—and more generally, to the institution of the prison and its antecedents, dating back to chattel slavery. The rape scene in Wong’s paintings, then, is not merely a fantasy. It could be read as an illustration of the state’s war of counterinsurgency, or as a continuation of what Spillers describes as an American grammar “grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement.”
Martin Wong, The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero: Cupcake and Paco, 1984. Copyright Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York.
I think all of this is true or could be true. With some distance, I also think of the critical encounters I staged—with Marxist theories of the city, with abolitionist theories of the prison-industrial complex, with Black radicalism and Black feminism—as moments of friction or failure or incompleteness. I was trying to read the prison literally, as a real social institution in history. But Wong denied having any interest in politics. His prison was a daydreamed fantasy, and his statements on the paintings were cryptic and contradictory. Some of his remarks hint at the centrality of the carceral—as material and metaphor—to his vision. “I wanted to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict and confinement that has us all bound together in this life without possibility of parole by whatever chains of desire be they financial, chemical or karmic,” Wong wrote in a statement for his 1985 show at Semaphore Gallery. “Always locked in, always locked out, winners and loosers [sic] all.” But when asked, on another occasion, what it was about prisons that interested him, Wong said: “Just the fact that it’s white on white.” Despite his proximity to formerly incarcerated artists and neighbors, he did not claim for the paintings any sociological authenticity, though they drew on the life experiences of Piñero and another artist named James Rivera. “I didn’t actually go to the jail; it was kind of a folk art jail with a photomontage of the original cast,” he said in a 1989 interview with Margo Machida, referring to Piñero’s play. “Instead of real people I tried to make it look like bad photomontage, a faded photograph cut out of a scrapbook and pasted onto the painting.” Indeed, Wong’s archive includes taped-together collages of a visit to Alcatraz: the ultimate symbol of the prison as icon or image.
My interest in Wong coincided with (and was symptomatic of) a recent explosion of interest in his work. A traveling US retrospective, Human Instamatic (2015–17), had exposed a new generation of viewers and scholars to Wong, and many museums acquired his paintings for the first time throughout the 2010s and 2020s. My research coincided with a second retrospective, Malicious Mischief, that traveled to Berlin, Madrid, London, and Amsterdam, as well as the publication of a catalogue raisonné by Stanford University. Predictably, the market value of Wong’s work has increased accordingly. His auction record has been broken three times in the last five years, mostly recently by Portrait of Mikey Piñero at Ridge Street and Stanton (1985), which sold for $1.3 million. More anecdotally, staff at the New York University Libraries reported that three other researchers were accessing Wong’s papers around the same time as I was.
This flowering of interest owes much to the efforts of Wong’s friends and family—East Village scenesters, graffiti artists, and, most notably, his mother, Florence Wong Fle—who stewarded his legacy after his death. But perhaps because of my own generational distance from him, I was most interested in the identifications and projections that structured his posthumous reception among those who never knew him. These are typified by a short text written for the catalogue raisonné by Doryun Chong, the curator who first brought Wong’s work into the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. While he worked on the acquisition, Chong lived just a “quick jaunt” from the former site of Wong’s studio; he laments the absence of the “hedonism and exuberance, risks and exhilarations” he imagines were there in Wong’s day. Ensconced in a gentrified neighborhood and an institutionalized art world, Chong recalls feeling like he arrived “too late” to Wong’s world. “In retrospect,” Chong wrote, “I perhaps felt awed by how Martin had been so much more queer and, even possibly, so much more Asian than I and those of my generation were and would ever be.”
I couldn’t help but feel a little dubious reading this. Wong never occupied social categories in an earnest or unproblematic way. The artist of a patently kitschy series of Chinatown paintings could hardly be cast as a paragon of Asian authenticity or queer alterity. I was more compelled by writers who reflected on the strangeness of their attachment to him. The scholar Roy Pérez’s writings on Wong, for instance, are structured around a series of awkward, blundering, or overeager “queer advances”: the artist’s advances toward Nuyorico, the critic’s advances toward Wong, and so on. Riffing on Wong’s nickname Chino Malo (bad Chinese), Pérez offers a beautifully sensitive account of maldad (badness or wrongness) in his work. With a tinge of utopian longing, Pérez does not hide his interest in “recovering the wrongness” of these paintings:
Perhaps it is Wong’s messiness or maldad, his willingness to suspend realist representational politics and his unabashed Freudian fetishization of latinidad as he pictorializes queer proximity and solitude, that provides the energy or bandwidth for such reparative work and optimism. To be willing to do things badly, or wrongly, to bracket a fear of lo malo or of committing una maldad, loosens identity practices from their toil toward completion and full knowing, placing feelings and economics, trade and neighbors, the art world and the barrio, gay life and Nuyorico not on a chain of equivalence or in easy solidarity but beside each other, making unequal exchanges that are fraught with ambivalence, pleasure, and suspicion.
Ultimately, the allies I found in my attempt to make sense of Wong’s thorniest body of work were queer critics who examined their objects in this spirit of love and ambivalence. During Wong’s life, the ambivalent object par excellence was the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In a way, the conversation about race and sexuality that I wished to have about Wong had already happened around Mapplethorpe—in the writings of critics like Kobena Mercer, and in the work of artists like Glenn Ligon, Isaac Julien, and Darrel Ellis. The humorless fetishism and neoclassical austerity of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, however, are easier to dislike than Wong’s weird, campy, lovey-dovey work. His paintings are far likelier to invite doting overidentification than what Mercer describes as the “intractable ambivalence that Mapplethorpe arouses with such perverse precision”—except for the prison paintings, that is.
Photograph of the exhibition Party at Bob and Gregg’s: Featuring Never Before Seen Jail Paintings by Martin Wong, 141 Ridge Street, Apt. 4, New York, April 13, 1984, 1984. Copyright Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York.
Wong certainly disappointed my utopian hopes for him, and part of my project’s intention was to dwell on what is most intractable about him. After all, no one paid much attention to his swastika drawings or paintings of racist kitsch. In the crudest identitarian reading, Wong’s multilingual storefronts and the many-hued faces of paintings like La Vida (1988) could be seen as enacting social solidarity and prefiguring multicultural democracy. This interpretation overlooks the inauthentic, camp, abject, and simply wrong character of Wong’s figurations of racial otherness. In the face of the prison paintings, we cannot forget Jared Sexton’s insight that “what establishes race, what positions one within racial formation, is the relation one suffers and/or enjoys with respect to the state-sponsored social organization of violence and sexuality.”
I came to feel that the prison paintings mark a limit to the institutional assimilation of Wong’s work. The assemblage of Sharp in Apartment 4 is an aporia in attempts to slot his work into history: the destroyed paintings do not appear in his catalogue raisonné and cannot appear in any retrospective. None of the prison paintings have attained the iconic status of Wong’s city paintings. As an insistently material and politicized setting, the prison is not available for retrospective romanticization the way that Wong’s neighborhood is. The prison paintings remain precariously perched on the edge of something: where ambivalence comes up against commitment, where desire meets history, and where fantasy meets brute force. Of course, these uneasy meetings have always been staged across Wong’s work (not least in his titles), from Chainsaw Valentine: Portrait of Joaquín Aganza (1984) and Sweet Oblivion (1983) to an early series of ceramics called “love-letter incinerators.”
Martin Wong, Chainsaw Valentine (Portrait of Joaquin Aganza), 1983. Copyright Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York.
In a project that seemed increasingly about the aesthetics of complicity and impurity, I held onto Sharp’s gesture of confiscating and destroying Wong’s paintings as an abolitionist one. His decisive operation of deconstruction and negation embodies what I wish was there in Wong’s work. But idealizing Sharp’s act as pure opposition risks another kind of disappointment. After all, they remained friends. They continued to collaborate on paintings until Wong’s death, and in a 2013 email to Vo, Sharp disclosed that he had kept part of the assemblage. “In retrospect, it was a beautiful painting from the vantage point of artistic creativity—funny that, at the time, I was unable to appreciate its artistic merit given that this was some deep dark fantasy of Martin’s,” he wrote. “In retrospect, it is like a love letter, it is a beautiful rendition of the expression of creativity; all matters of the heart are pure. Perhaps unrequited love or unreciprocated love is the purest as it involves no human contact.”
After I finished my thesis in 2023, I didn’t want to share it with anyone. I couldn’t escape the feeling of failure or impasse. I had wanted so badly to believe that Wong’s paintings could function as abolitionist maps, or perhaps even as prototypes for an erotics of liberation, across and beyond prison walls. I wanted to believe that love could conquer all and redeem everything. But the longer I spent with them, the more trouble I had claiming them for anything at all. I couldn’t trust grand gestures of repudiation either. My voluminous notes and writings on Wong were starting to feel endlessly shifting and kaleidoscopic, like its own kind of bad photomontage. I felt tempted to abandon the paintings and close the book on my research, but something kept me tethered to them. Perhaps my ambivalence corresponded to a general feeling of interregnum, of being in the wake of an uprising that is not over and whose fate is unresolved.
In retrospect, was it all a love letter? During my three years of research, I periodically thought back to a line from Deleuze, which reached me via Eve Tuck: “If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it.” I think back, tenderly, to all the places Wong took me, all the good times we had: cruising the brick facades and handball courts that he painted throughout the Lower East Side; taking my dad to the site of Wong’s former studio, where the apartment show had happened; studying Wong’s papers and holding his things in my hands. Somewhere in his archive is a paper lantern that springs, when its manila folder is opened, into a resplendent red dome. This felt like a miracle, a sign.
One July morning, during a visit home, I made a pilgrimage to Wong’s urn at the Neptune Society Columbarium, a ten-minute bike ride from where I grew up in San Francisco. Its niche contained photographs of Wong and his parents, a tiny brick tondo (a miniature version of his 1988 painting Heaven), and paintbrushes caked with the gleaming metal pigment he built his cities with. There was also a metal pin featuring a photograph of two men locked behind miniature bars. The men, sporting bowler hats and smoking cigars, peered out through a heart-shaped aperture. Wong’s prison romance, it seemed, had followed him into the afterlife. When I stepped outside, I checked my email and saw that my bid for a Supreme × Martin Wong eight-ball beanie had been accepted on a streetwear resale site. I wasn’t sure what had possessed me to want to own such a thing. It was my turn to feel embarrassed, rapacious, lovestruck.
Martin Wong, 47-04, 1992. Copyright Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York.
I can still say that I love Wong, but his prison paintings are difficult to love. When describing my research to other people, I often turned to this language of difficulty. The paintings are tricky, I’d say. They’re thorny. But if “difficulty” in contemporary art is typically associated with withholding—austerity of form, ambiguity of meaning, and absence of affect—the difficulty of Wong’s prison paintings is precisely that they show too much. Everything about them is excessive: Wong’s unconcealed attraction to Black and brown men, his overeager identification with the outlaw, the readiness with which he admits to becoming “hot and bothered” by tall tales of prison rape. As a critic, it is hardly a difficult task to reveal or problematize Wong’s fantasies of racial fetishism and state violence. These fantasies are nakedly visible for anyone who cares to look.
Abolition, in my mind, is also about where desire meets history: the desire to approach and touch a utopian horizon, even through and amid the unbearable violence of the given. When I would talk about my thesis with friends, I joked about the possibility of a short-form opinion piece titled “What Martin Wong Can Teach Us About Abolition.” Can Martin Wong teach us anything about abolition? I’m not sure. But he has taught me a lot. He’s taught me most of all about what Mercer, in reference to Mapplethorpe, calls the “risky business of ambivalence”; what Kadji Amin, in reference to Jean Genet, calls “deidealization”; and what Tuck, in reference to Deleuze, calls “valuing the irreconcilable.”
I have learned to live with these feelings as a practice of getting close to something, not staying away. A year after I first saw the prison paintings, I visited Wong’s show in Berlin and saw many of them again. I looked at them long and hard. I took so many pictures of them.
I write here what I wrote then: Abolition is an ideal that I refuse to let you spoil. Until then, I’ll hold you close. But both of us know we’ll have to walk away someday.
