Tony WONG’s artistic trajectory spans a constellation of cities and cultural landscapes, beginning in Hong Kong, moving through Chicago and Berkeley, and eventually converging in New York. These locations are more than mere points of transit; they represent the intersections of disparate cultures, social structures, and lived experiences. For years, WONG’s practice has been predominantly situated within the context of Neo-Expressionism, characterized by thick gestural brushwork, vivid imagery, and emotive palettes that respond to personal history and the zeitgeist. However, a retrospective look at his work from the 1970s and 1980s reveals that this period was not merely a stylistic prelude, but a critical formative phase that has remained largely overlooked in systematic scholarship.
During this era, "America" had not yet coalesced into a stable entity for the artist. Cultural differences, class structures, and ethnic identity were woven into the fabric of his daily life, rendering "assimilation" not a destination to be reached, but a continuous state of flux. Through prolonged observation and residency, WONG gradually cultivated a relationship with his environment—using art not to secure a fixed identity, but to explore the emergence of boundaries between the self and the external world. From early linear sketches and collage-like compositions to the nuanced interpersonal dynamics within his paintings, his work captures a process of becoming. In this sense, "America" functions here not as a monolithic geographic or national concept, but as a site in formation—a place not yet fully reached. Tony WONG’s art takes shape within this unfinished dialectic; it does not respond to a predetermined subject, but carves out its own creative position through a perpetual process of approaching, calibrating, and witnessing.
During the 1970s, as the Chicago Imagists were at their zenith, the American art scene was saturated with a re-evaluation of imagery, the body, and vernacular experience. Within this milieu, Tony WONG employed collage as an experimental visual methodology to navigate the cultural and perceptual landscapes he encountered. Here, collage does not merely echo the Imagists’ penchant for popular imagery and private iconographies; it also engages in a dialogue with Surrealist tenets of chance, the subconscious, and the juxtaposition of disparate elements. By reconfiguring unrelated objects, Wong liberates images from their original contexts, transforming them into open fields of perception. The slides and archival cabinets presented in this exhibition reveal the artist’s iterative experimentation with how the same objects shift through different arrangements, linear treatments, and chromatic relationships. These practices were not intended to establish a fixed symbolic system but to cultivate—amidst fragmented compositions—a vocabulary that oscillates between lived experience and imaginative structure.
As the 1980s approached, WONG’s practice pivoted toward a profound engagement with the human figure. In his crayon works, the figure serves not just as a narrative protagonist but as a nodal point of relations. The compositions do not propel a story; instead, they linger at the threshold of a narrative moment, inviting the viewer to generate their own meaning. Here, the canvas becomes a transitional zone between the conscious and the subconscious—brushstrokes manifest as traces of thought, while color carries the flux of perception and emotion.
This period of sustained experimentation with materiality, iconography, and narrative allowed Wong’s creative process to develop in dialogue with his environment without being confined by its norms. It was within this state of evolution that WONG established an extensible artistic language, laying the intellectual and methodological groundwork for the more fluid and liberated expressions found in his later pastels and three-dimensional paintings. In oil portrait series such as Waiter and Mrs. Jones, and the relational He and She series, WONG deliberately maintains the figures in a state of indeterminacy. Faces are frequently cropped, obscured, or vanished beyond the frame, disrupting conventional spectatorship and redirecting the viewer’s gaze toward localized details: the curve of a shoulder, the fold of a collar, the expanse of a back, or the tonality of skin. The gestalt image cannot be grasped in an instant; recognition is deferred, forcing the act of looking to linger.
In everyday human perception, the face and its expressions serve as the primary shorthand for judgment. When this critical information is absent, the rhythm of viewing shifts—attention is prolonged, and the emergence of emotion becomes less immediate. The distance, posture, and arrangement of figures suggest a relationship, yet lack explicit interactive cues, leaving the connection unexplained. This strategy of open-ended composition intentionally dismantles the social categorizations that viewers habitually rely upon. When the face is no longer the epicenter of judgment, the viewer must navigate through layers of color, the emergence of brushwork, and the shifting of contours. Consequently, the act of looking evolves from identifying identity to sensing the generation of relations. The figures are not presented as complete entities; they exist in a state of continuous formation—beings that wait to be seen, and wait to be understood.
Tony WONG employs the line as the foundational point of departure for perceiving the world, using it to weave together the core inquiries of this exhibition, Tony WONG 1970–1980. The gallery space begins with imagery from the artist’s sketchbooks—the genesis of both vision and thought—pointing toward a creative site that remains un-fixed and inviting the viewer into this temporal state of "becoming." Looking back at his trajectory from the 1970s through the 1980s, one observes how WONG meticulously constructed a mode of relating to the world through a synthesis of daily observation, formal experimentation, and material exploration.
Consequently, the subtitle "An America Not Yet Arrived" does not merely denote geographic migration or the shift of cultural identity; rather, it describes a state of creation and cognition. In this context, "America" is simultaneously a physical reality and a field that is perpetually observed, interpreted, and reconstructed. WONG’s practice unfolds within this unfinished dialectic, utilizing the mechanics of line, color, and composition to carve out a creative position situated between the internal and the external. In this phase of his work, "not arriving" is not synonymous with absence or deficiency; it is a state of continuous operation. The works are deeply rooted in specific historical and social realities, yet they maintain a perceptual and formal openness that keeps the act of viewing in a state of productive deferral.
This text does not seek to provide a definitive conclusion to this period of the artist's career, but rather to present it in its nascent state. What these works open up is not only the artist’s own mode of seeing but an invitation to the viewer to reconsider how the subject, the relationship, and the perception continue to take shape within the "not yet arrived."
