Martin Wong's exhibition at Camden art centre struck a chord with me, as it was the first time I had met the artist and seen some of his major series of works. wong's practice draws on and incorporates a variety of visual languages, including Chinese landscape painting, calligraphy, Tantric painting, graffiti, sign language, as well as Western ancient and modern masters. what attracted me most to Wong was his translation and use of classical language. What attracts me most to Wong is his translation and use of classical language. Figure 1, "down for the count", shows the aftermath of a boxing match. A victorious boxer waves his hands in the air in a reckless gesture, while two firemen carry the unconscious loser out of the ring, and a boy, perhaps Wong himself, clings to the winner's waist. He stares at us, the only one in the whole picture to do so. You belong here too, he seems to be saying. wong based his work on an ancient amphora from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The greek vase depicts Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death) removing the body of Zeus' son sarpedon after he was killed in the Trojan War. "How alike they are," writes WONG on the exhibition where the work debuted "twins in every way, yet like mirror images, complete opposites. Only when we count down to the last second do the twin firefighters (Hypnos and Thanatos) come to reclaim themselves, because only in sleep are we equal.

Figure 2 is Wong's first prison painting, "the annunciation according to Mikey Pinero (cupcake and paco)", which is a rough adaptation of one of Pinero scenes, in which he moved the original group shower scene to the prison cell and added a third character. cell, and added a third character, the prison.Wong also borrowed from the Christian iconographic style of the compositional scene of the Annunciation. Through these adaptations and appropriations, Wong's paintings thoroughly transform the desperate squalor of the pinero story into a vulnerable, sacred, queer, and heroic scene.

Figures 3 and 4 are also Wong's signature Chinese-inspired paintings. Wong was so enamoured of Tantric thangka paintings that he travelled alone to Nepal to study Tantric painting and calligraphy. He would use golden lines to outline the edges of objects, which in thangkas are understood to be the aura lines, which also represent the nature radiance of wisdom and compassion from the deity's body. Wong is sensitive to the transformation of his environment, from his still life and calligraphy in San Francisco to his prison paintings, brick paintings and later queer fantasies in New York's Lower East Side, he would frantically take in the nutrients of his environment and react to them on the canvas, then superimpose iconic symbols on them. He would draw wildly from his environment and react to it on the canvas, then superimpose iconic symbols and his secondary sources to reveal a richly layered realism. In Wong's work, I can strongly sense the intertwining of the vulgar and the sacred, the ugly and the romantic, the oriental and the traditional western iconography, thanks to Wong's rich pool of resources and his storied personal history.

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