Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong was the first museum survey of a Chinese-American artist’s rapturous visions of ethnic urban experience. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and a resident of New York’s Lower East Side since the early 1980s, Wong became highly acclaimed for his paintings of crumbling tenement façades in fantastic landscapes featuring gilded constellation diagrams, stylized hearing-impaired symbols, and street-beat poetry by Miguel Piñero. Even within the quirky, flashier-than-thou East Village art scene in the 1980s Wong’s paintings always stood out. An eccentric character in the art world—a Chinese-American portraying a Hispanic neighborhood—he revitalized traditional landscape paintings with bricks, iron gates, chain link, sign language, and verse.

Thirty-four paintings dating from 1983 to 1993 were included. Rizzoli International and The New Museum co-published a 96-page color catalogue with essays by Carlo McCormick, Lydia Yee, Yasmin Ramirez, and co-curators Dan Cameron and Barry Blinderman.