M artin Wong’s Sunset Park Panoramic from 1985 is an undisputed masterpiece from one of the artist’s most significant bodies of work, The Sunset Park Paintings. This celebrated series, depicting the urban landscape of downtown Brooklyn, originated as a commission for Time Magazine’s Images ’85: Pictures of the Year issue. This particular work was featured as the issue’s cover story and illustrated across two pages within the magazine, alongside stories highlighting the gritty neighborhood’s residents. In February 1986, art dealer Barry Blinderman debuted the complete Sunset Park Paintings series at his Semaphore Gallery, giving Wong his third solo exhibition at the gallery and solidifying him as a major artistic force. It was at this show that the 19-year-old actor Matt Dillon purchased the painting, which has remained in his private collection ever since. Matt Dillon and Martin Wong became good friends thereafter, which resulted in Wong dedicating one of his iconic sign language in Dillon's honor. Illustrated below, this work spells out Matt Dillon's name in ASL and underscores the artist's admiration for Dillon as well as references gang signals or secret codes for the homosexual community that Wong frequently explored in his practice. Dillon remembers, “Martin was such an amazing painter and was really supportive of young artists from the downtown scene. He would buy drawings from friends of mine right on the street. He ended up amassing one of the biggest graffiti collection in the world.” Indeed, Dillon immersed himself in the growing Downtown 80s arts scene and befriend artists such as Futura 2000, who is credited with bringing Dillon to the Semaphore exhibition.

Sunset Park Panoramic is a masterful proclamation of Wong’s singular talent, discerning eye, and unmatched ability to deliver a raw, deeply poignant portrait of a neighborhood plagued with poverty and propelled by relentless determination, heart and grit. In this work, Wong’s artistic sensibility and deep-rooted penchant for layered symbology is on full display. We see evidence of Wong’s most important conceptual motifs that embellish and give emotional meaning to the Time project. Wong’s artistic approach to the assignment is anything but routine and reactive. He infuses every aspect of this painting with heightened emotion and metaphorical gravitas. It is through Wong’s eyes that we as viewers come to perceive the neighborhood of Sunset Park, and it is Wong’s careful interpretation and recording of the scene that makes this painting an unequivocal triumph within his celebrated corpus of work.

Born in 1946 to Chinese immigrant parents in Portland, Oregon, Martin Wong found acceptance as an openly gay man in the hippie culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. In 1978, Wong embarked for New York to forge his career as an artist and established himself as a fixture within the Lower East Side’s developing art scene. There he surrounded himself with an eclectic group of friends such as Charlie Ahearn, Julie Ault, Jane Dickson and Keith Haring who found themselves at the epicenter of the thriving, gritty downtown scene of the 1980s. Initially making his living as a street portrait painter, Wong explored multiple diverse ethnic and racial identities, powerfully demonstrated his multilingualism, and explored and celebrated his queer sexuality. Observing the crumbling ghetto urbanscape around him with a loving and honest vision, Wong depicted the city with a wholly unique language that straddled the realistic and the romantic. As Holland Cotter writes: “Neighborhood buildings are fortresslike, crushing, sinister. Empty lots are piled with trash. Yet there are miracles everywhere: gold paint shines in windows, night skies bloom with stars. We are touring the Heavenly City of Oz to the tune of “All Along the Watchtower” (Holland Cotter, “Martin Wong, an Urban Visionary With a Hungry Eye,” The New York Times, 19 November 1995).

Sunset Park Panoramic is an extraordinary feat within Wong’s oeuvre as it delicately balances the most foundational aspects of Wong’s painting style with more daring use of perspective and brighter colors. Moving across the composition of the work, there is a critical twist, or revision, to his characteristic one-point, flattened, and straight-on perspective (known formally as isometric perspective). Here, the scene is painted in a never-before-seen panoramic view. It is exceptionally rare to see Wong employ a complex vanishing point perspective as seen in the present work, and it is through this new type of perspective that Wong creates a rich, layered narrative in every moment of the composition. To the left, the row of brownstone houses serve as an entrance into the scene and depth-yielding pictorial device. The sinuous curvature following the bay windows appears as a wave, guiding the eye into the bay and creating a fluid line of comparison linking “wave” to water. The Statue of Liberty, a symbol of acceptance, opportunity and the American Dream, anchors the open bay and is followed to the right by other staples of the iconic New York skyline: The Twin Towers and the Empire State Building. While the eerily-colored pink sky is depicted in a cloudy haze, Lady Liberty is untouched and unconsumed by the incumbent fog, further underscoring the sculpture’s importance to the artist.

Central to Wong’s work is the use of multiples. This is often seen as “pairs” or “twins” in his paintings, but also includes any type of intentional repetition of form. The present work is distinguished by such multiples, most prominently and perhaps most obviously seen in the pair of figures in matching jackets walking towards the waterfront. For Wong, the idea of “twinning” was of supreme importance, as it related to his in-depth research of Hypnos and Thanatos, characters in Homer’s Iliad who represented sleep and death. Hypnos and Thanatos comforted the dead soul on the way to the underworld, and for Wong, a proclaimed existentialist, this journey to the metaphorical “Hades” was a daily reality. Living in downtown New York in the 1980s, Wong was surrounded by overdose and death. Whether it was the loss of his close friend and purported lover, the Nuyorican playwright Miguel Piñero, or living in an ecosystem of junkies and addicts, Wong was all-too familiar with the notion of the unconscious. It is through this deep concern for life and death that Wong became fixated on twins (sleep and death) as a symbol for his existential musings. The motif of the “double” is repeated by the boy’s hands caressing the basketball, by the balancing act of the old man and the young child who flank the matching twins, by the Twin Towers, and also by the pair of boys in rust-colored jackets who encircle the figure in head-to-toe Boston Celtics gear. Other expressions of multiples are seen elsewhere throughout the composition: in the row of cranes, the smoke pipes, water towers, and even in the rows of bricks which he painstakingly executed by painting every element on the facade. All these formal inclusions in Sunset Park Panoramicwere premeditated and carried great meaning for Wong as he attempted to code his understanding of life and death in an often-grim world.

Sunset Park Panoramic reigns as a sensational urban portrait of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and within Wong’s entire body of work, stands out as one of the most iconic and moving tableaus. A landscape that is as telling about its subject matter as it is about its creator, Sunset Park Panoramic endures as Wong’s touching tribute to the city he called home, underscoring his autobiographical approach to social realism and his fascination with New York’s ever-changing landscape.