Martin Wong’s Chinatown paintings return to Chicago in a major Wrightwood 659 exhibition
At Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, Martin Wong’s world of brick walls, storefronts, riverboats, and coded symbols has been gathered with unusual breadth. “Martin Wong: Chinatown USA,” organized by independent curator Yasufumi Nakamori with Wrightwood 659 assistant curator Ashley Janke, brings together more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs, including 11 works never before exhibited and the unseen reverse side of one large canvas. The exhibition is on view through July 18, 2026.
Wong, who was raised in San Francisco and lived in New York from 1978 to 1994, built a body of work that moved between Chinatown, urban life, graffiti, skateboarding, astrology, and American Sign Language. The Chicago presentation makes that range feel especially legible. It also benefits from loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Broad, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, giving the show the density of a survey assembled from the field’s most serious collections.
The exhibition arrives with a useful layer of context. In the catalog, Yasufumi Nakamori notes that Wong was hesitant to show his Chinatown paintings, in part because he feared being stereotyped and in part because his parents discouraged him from exhibiting them. Zully Adler adds that Wong eventually staged “Chinatown USA” in New York in 1992. At that opening, he reportedly brought fortune cookies, one of which read, “You will get an uncontrollable urge to buy a painting.”
That mix of wit, self-awareness, and cultural friction runs through the show. The galleries also include works that had been unseen for decades, among them “Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo),” 1982, a monumental painting that was shown at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025 with a $1.6 million asking price before going to the Broad Museum. Its presence underscores how Wong’s market, museum history, and personal iconography now intersect in a more public way than they did during his lifetime.
The installation has one final advantage: Wrightwood 659’s Tadao Ando-designed building allows Wong’s brick-wall paintings to hang on brick walls, a subtle but apt echo of the artist’s own visual language. The result is less a retrospective gesture than a carefully staged return, one that clarifies how Wong turned Chinatown into a site of memory, invention, and American contradiction.
