Unlike most of the artists lured to the Lower East Side by cheap rents, Wong extensively explored his new neighborhood and became deeply involved--personally and professionally--with its Latino residents. Sensitive to cultural difference, Wong consistently referred to himself as a tourist in the Lower East Side, but the usual meaning of that term does not convey the nature of his relationship with the community. Eager to interact on an equal footing with his neighbors, Wong taught himself to speak Spanish by picking up words from them. (Although Wong had a distant Mexican relative, nobody in his family spoke Spanish.) The nickname "Chino Malo" (Bad Chinese), affectionately given to Wong, attests to his integration into Loisaida.

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Throughout the 1980s, Wong devoted himself to depicting the streets and buildings of the Lower East and its residents, especially the workers, firemen, boxers, and criminals, who became his friends and lovers. Throughout the 1980s, Wong focused almost exclusively upon Latino and African-American subjects, thereby challenging theories of identity then prevailing in the art world, which held that artists should confine themselves to themes that were directly relevant to their own ethnic and racial heritage. However, as Yasmin Ramírez has noted, Wong's choice of subjects during the 1980s accords with the experiences of many Chinese immigrants who settled in Latino neighborhoods in the United States.

Artistic Transformation

During his first few years in New York, Wong successfully undertook a radical transformation in his style of painting. Considering that he held a variety of jobs to support himself throughout this period, his achievement is remarkable. In addition to being night watchman at Meyer's Hotel, Wong worked for several years at Pearl Paint. By the mid-1980s, he was employed as a clerk at the bookstore of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which began collecting his work in 1984.

Largely working on his own, Wong changed his art in ways that did not correspond to predominant trends in the contemporary art world. Although he did not receive any formal instruction to assist his development, he undertook intensive independent study of works by a wide variety of artists.

Among the many modern artists whose work profoundly influenced Wong, one may note the following: Grandma Moses, whose combination of obsessive detail and visionary imagination often has been compared to Wong's style; Edward Hopper, whose poetic views of New York directly anticipate Wong's cityscapes; Piet Mondrian, whose dynamic abstract compositions (such as Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43) directly inspired Wong's paintings of urban walls (notably, Flagstone Boogie Woogie, 1984); and Jasper Johns, whose enigmatic depictions of ordinary objects strongly influenced Wong's approach to his subjects. Of course, Wong also found constant inspiration in popular culture and in the people and buildings of the Lower East Side.

Stanton Near Forsyth Street

Typical of Wong's many paintings of street scenes done during the early 1980s, Stanton Near Forsyth Street (1983) exemplifies the transformation of his art.

The skillful handling of the spatial recession of the massive background buildings, the careful recording of the textures of the brick and plaster walls, and even the predominance of earth tones help to ground the image in this world. Yet, other elements emphasize that the scene is an artificial construct, endowed with mystical dimensions. Represented as a flat surface with no visible sides, the building in the foreground seems on the point of disappearing. Furthermore, Wong drew out and labeled several constellation charts, and he filled much of the sky with stylized hands that spell out in American Sign Language the words of one of his poems about the heavens at night.

Playing with levels of reality, Wong has painted a trompe l'oeil wooden frame, inscribed below with his name, the title, and date, and above with poetically evocative phrases: "Morning at the edge of time. It never really mattered."

In this picture, Wong's neighborhood seems desolate. The only two men on the street seem dwarfed by the massive buildings with boarded up windows. At the far left, a figure, closely resembling the artist, stands, facing the viewer, while a man, shown in profile, walks in his direction. These figures might be related to a pick-up narrative, but there are no explicit indications of interaction between them. Complicating efforts to devise a narrative is the Spanish inscription, describing a scenario that does not correspond with Wong's arrangement of figures.