The glory that was wrong: el “Chino Malo” approximates Nuyorico

Abstract

Nicknamed “Chino Malo,” Chinese American painter and art collector Martin Wong's proximity to the Puerto Rican Lower East Side in the 1980s has been under-elaborated and eclipsed to some degree by his collaborations with the Nuyorican literary figurehead Miguel Piñero. By isolating a selection of minor paintings from that legacy – including Chain Saw Heart (Portrait of Joaquin Aganza) (1984), Rapture (1988), and Stanton Near Forsyth Street (1983) – the author contends that a poetics of proximity unfolds through which the national, racial, sexual, and even aesthetic internal orders of Nuyorico are suspended, disturbed, and reframed. The author describes Wong's poetics as a series of persistent queer advances that unsettle Nuyorico's “good” center and develops proximity as a critical alternative to theories of acculturation that hold sway in Latina/o studies. He then figures la maldad signaled by Wong's nickname as an aesthetic posture or attitude. Mal movement or comportment – to defer fear of committing maldades and willfully do things badly, wrongly, or approximately – loosens identity practices from their toil toward completion and full knowing. Grounding the author's analysis across each painting are Wong's signature uses of salvaged, trompe l'oeil, and textual frames through which the artist modulates his lingering in Nuyorico and develops a poetics of proximity.

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