Martin Wong began working on painted plywood cutouts of Popeye the Sailor Man in 1989. His intention, never realized during his lifetime, was to motorize the arms of each figure so that they would rock up and down on a central pivot. Twenty-seven years after Wong’s death, these kinetic sculptures are finally making their debut as the centerpiece of “Popeye,” P·P·O·W’s sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work (on view through June 6, 2026). The show traces comic-book illustration and tattoo imagery as recurrent motifs throughout Wong’s oeuvre, but looking at his dancing sailor men, what popped out at me wasn’t so much a general obsession with American vernacular culture but another major throughline in his work—the brick wall.
Taking a cue from how Wong hyphenates Popeye’s name in the series title (“Pop-eye”), I was struck by the uncanny illusion of volume that the cutouts briefly attain when viewed from straight on. It is as if they really were made of diminutive bricks, bulging into the protuberant forms of three-dimensional figures. The effect does not last long, however, flickering only now and again in constant tension with the painted plywood’s resolute planarity; since the objects are arranged along a diagonal line that slices across the gallery space, it is impossible to avoid awareness of how thin they are. Victor Vasarely’s Sign Sculpture (1977), an icon of Op Art, does something similar: surface color and pattern produce a sense of depth in total conflict with the extension of real space all around. Much like the repetitive oscillation of Popeye’s arms—up and down, up and down—Wong leaves his sailor men in the perpetual process of popping out to the eye.
And he does this multiple times over: there are three mirrored pairs of small Popeyes, or six in total, all paradoxically reliant on surface image to express a desire to become objects. The redundancy is in many ways the point, placing the cutouts in competition with one another, for the eye can only focus on one at a time. Twins such as these are yet another recurrent motif in Wong’s work, and an inscription from his 1985 painting Twin Machine, reproduced in the zine accompanying this exhibition, is helpful here: “HOW VERY MUCH ALIKE / THEY WERE TWINS IN / EVERY WAY AND YET / LIKE MIRROR IMAGES / HOW COMPLETELY OPPOSITE.” The “Pop-eye” series, then, is Wong’s way of staging the struggle to see difference within similarity.
Crucially, this can be a joyful struggle. The cutouts do not simply constitute a scene of individuation within any old genus, but one of sexual object choice tied specifically to the gay subcultures of the 1970s and ’80s. In other words, Popeye is not a random choice, for the way these sailor men flash their muscles recalls the macho drag and clone culture in which Wong, who often dressed as a cowboy, was a participant. That these works should premiere now not only brings together many disparate threads of the artist’s work but also feels like a timely reminder of the flatness of generic types.