NEW YORK, NY.- Doyle New York’s November 11 auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art offered a wide range of paintings and sculpture by prominent and emerging artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the sale’s highlights was a 1989 large-scale tondo by Martin Wong (American, 1946-1999) titled Liberty Mourning the Death of Her Sister – Beijing. This powerful painting attracted international attention, and the resulting competitive bidding sent the work soaring past its estimate of $20,000-40,000 to achieve a stunning $137,000, a world auction record for the artist. The price almost tripled the prior record for the artist of $47,500 set in February 2013.

A Chinese-American artist living in New York’s Lower East Side, Martin Wong famously championed the pre-gentrified landscape of his decaying neighborhood, as well as the heroes of his heritage. This work, created for inclusion in the Asian American Arts Centre's group show, “CHINA: June 4, 1989 An Art Exhibition,” was his sobering reaction to the Tiananmen Square massacre that had become an international incident just a few months prior. To the cheering of 100,000 onlookers, student protestors wheeled a 33-foot high papier-mache sculpture they dubbed "Lady Liberty," their embodiment of the Statue of Liberty. In Martin Wong's work, the Statue of Liberty collapses in sorrow, reacting to the existential death of the protestors' Lady Liberty, and in kind, the death of their hopes for democracy, freedom of speech and much more.

Martin Wong arrived in the Lower East Side from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1978, setting up a studio for his self-trained painting in a crowded apartment. His work documents the Lower East Side of the 1980s and ‘90s -- the fire-trap tenements, rusty gates and spray-paint encrusted handball courts. He was beloved in the New York art world and an essential figure in Downtown art history. He attended every key art event in Manhattan and even secretly gave his artist friends free supplies while working at Pearl Paint.

As famed for his own artwork as for his intense collecting habits of other artists’ work, Martin donated his legendary collection of Graffiti art in 1994 to the Museum of the City of New York. The Museum’s 2014 blockbuster exhibition, “City As Canvas,” and its accompanying book by Rizzoli, celebrated this remarkable collection assembled by Martin.

Martin succumbed to the AIDS virus in 1999, just one year after a career retrospective of his work at New York’s New Museum.