Chinese American Artist's Calligraphic Poems
Footprints Poems & Leaves
Notes: A chapbook of poems, reproducing the author-artist's calligraphy. During his life (Portland, 1946 – San Francisco, 1999), Wong was a respected but not commercially successful artist. Early in his career, he explored poetry, calligraphy inspired by Chinese scrolls and graffiti, ceramics, and drawing. He moved to New York in 1978, where he painted in the Lower East Side. This collection of poems, many written while he was pursuing a degree in ceramics at Humboldt State College (now Cal Poly Humboldt), is one of his early explorations of calligraphy as an art form.
Wong employs several styles of handwriting, but always prints with capital letters and little or no space between the lines. Most of the poems are dated and together they form an impressionistic diary for 1966 to 1968.
The chapbook has two printed covers, creating double-page illustrations at the front and back, as well as a single-page illustration facing the first and last text pages. There is one interior illustration. All of the illustrations reproduce drawings by the author.
In 1998, a traveling show, Sweet Oblivion, was the only major show Wong had in his lifetime. The first sign of increasing interest in Wong's work came in 2014 when the Museum of the City of New York put on an exhibition based on Wong's collection of graffiti artists and published a monograph, City as Canvas. That was followed by the retrospective, Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, in 2016. Stanford University Library, in collaboration with the Martin Wong Estate, is creating a digital catalogue raisonné. In 2023, an international traveling exhibition, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, will be accompanied by a 350-page catalog, documenting Wong's "queer existence," his interest in "marginal communities and gentrification", and his "visual vocabulary that merged Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti and sign language."
At the time this chapbook was published, Wong sold drawings for $7.50. In 2022, one of his paintings sold for more than $1 million at auction.
[68] pages.
OCLC: 8662695 (New York University, Cal Poly Humboldt, UC, Brown), 66827414 (Amsterdam), 335014473 (Arizona)
Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). Staples rusting, else a near fine copy.
Publication: San Francisco: (the author), [1968].
Item No: #362506
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