In some Chinatown pictures, Wong included portraits of himself and relatives, freely combined from various decades. For example, standing in the left foreground of Grant Avenue, San Francisco (1992) is the artist's Aunt Nora, closely resembling photographs of her taken in the 1930s, when she worked as an emcee in a Chinatown nightclub. Gazing over her shoulder is a portrait of the artist as a young boy in the early 1950s.

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In the right foreground of Grant Avenue, a handsome, muscular man turns around to gaze in the direction of the viewer; this figure could be described as an Asian translation of the men on the streets in Wong's paintings of the Lower East Side. As if to underline his homoerotic appeal, Wong shows this man eagerly sucking on a Popsicle while holding a cigarette. The stylized, gilded buildings in the background are based upon structures actually on Grant Avenue, but Wong has rearranged them. The vivid red sky emphasizes that this is a theatrical recreation of the San Francisco street.

Although most Chinatown paintings involve recollections of San Francisco, Canal Street (1992) depicts the Golden Empire Jewelry Center, located at the corner of Canal and Center Streets in New York City. Wong presents side-by-side, duplicate views of this New York landmark, along with two versions of the adjacent telephone booth, streetlight, and subway entrance. Although the two exteriors seem identical, a glance inside the windows reveals significant gender differences. In the left building, six elaborately coiffed women in elegant, silk cocktail dresses press themselves up against the windows of the third floor. In the right building, the only figure visible is a man wearing a business suit, who stands stiffly behind one of the doors on the ground floor.

On a broad band, extending across the top of the picture, large gold-bordered letters and characters identify the building in English and Chinese. Displayed in the midst of these inscriptions is a gold-framed portrait of the artist, who smiles broadly at the viewer. Although his head is turned in the direction of the building on the left, his eyes are focused to the right. Wong has portrayed himself dressed in the quintessentially American garments that he often wore: bright cowboy shirt and tall Stetson hat. Located midway between two differently gendered versions of a stereotypically Asian structure in America's largest city, Wong is ideally situated to construct a distinctive identity, composed of diverse cultural and sexual elements.

Wong visualized a very fluid conception of gender in several other Chinatown pictures, such as In the Studio (1992), which inverts the traditional relation of male artist to female model. Poised with brushes in hand before canvases on easels, two women artists prepare to paint a seated male figure. These gender-bending women combine distinct cultural traditions by wearing Chinese silk dresses with Western stockings and shoes.

Wong exuberantly conveys gay male sexual energy in many of the paintings associated with his Chinatown series. For example, in Incident at Waverly Lane (1992), he shows Kato with an emphatically erect penis, practically bursting through his pants, as he jumps above a stage set version of a street in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Quoting from his earlier Big Heat, Wong again represents two firemen passionately kissing in Sanja Cake (1991). Here, the two men are displayed within a heart, lined with brick walls, which recall the backgrounds of many of his paintings of the Lower East Side. In turn, the brick heart is placed at the center of the wrapper for the popular Chinese-American product, labeled in English and Chinese. Thus, Wong here creates an intensely erotic image that fuses many cultural referents, all of great personal significance to him.

Final years

In 1994, Wong was diagnosed with AIDS, and, as his health declined the following year, he decided to move back to San Francisco. Although he continued to paint, the level of his production declined.

In 1998, a comprehensive retrospective exhibition--held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and at Illinois State University Galleries, Normal--contributed to his growing reputation as a major American artist.

Martin Wong died on August 12, 1999 at the San Francisco home of his mother, Florence Wong Fie, who tenderly cared for him during his final years. To celebrate his life and art, the Museum of the City of New York held a memorial program in his honor on November 1, 1999.

Conclusion

Since Wong's death, his paintings have been included in many exhibitions in North America, Asia, and Europe. Wong is now recognized as a pioneer of the cross-cultural perspectives that have become increasingly valued in the art world.

Wong frequently stated that he most wanted to be remembered for contributing to the heritage of gay male figurative painting established by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and other American painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Incorporating queer perspectives into poetic depictions of the Lower East Side and into exuberant images of San Francisco's (and sometimes New York's) Chinatown, Wong significantly broadened the scope of queer expression in American art and opened the way for new developments in the twenty-first century.

After Stonewall, American gay male art underwent a radical transformation as artists came out and began to treat gay themes openly and directly.

Contemporary Art, which designates new currents in art since 1970, is identified with postmodernism; during this period an art addressing gay and lesbian identity emerged.

Off and on over two centuries, New York City has also reigned as the capital of homosexual, transgender, and queer life in America.

Although his personal sexual orientation is uncertain, American painter, photographer, and teacher Thomas Eakins is solidly aligned in the history of art with a homophile sensibility, as expressed particularly in his celebration of the male form.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

In his all-too-brief lifetime, gay American artist Keith Haring produced simple yet sophisticated images that reached a worldwide audience and transcended differences of race, nationality, gender, age, and sexual orientation.

One of the most important American painters and printmakers of the second half of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer created a distinctly American, modern classical style in which he celebrated male and female friendships.

Known for his iconic yet cryptic paintings, acclaimed American artist Jasper Johns is a key figure in the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism.

One of the greatest painters in the history of art and an outstanding empirical scientist, Leonardo was haunted by his illegitimacy and rumors of homosexuality.