Wong's paintings often explored multiple ethnic and racial identities, exhibited cross-cultural elements, demonstrated multilingualism, and celebrated his queer sexuality.

[2] He exhibited for two decades at notable New York galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P.P.O.W., among others, before his death in San Francisco from an AIDS-related illness.

[3] Florence, also born in Portland, was the daughter of a jewelry store owner from Guangzhou, and was raised in the Chinese city following her birth before returning to Oregon in 1940 to avoid the Japanese occupation.

While involved with The Angels of Light, Wong participated in the emerging hippie movement and engaged in the period's climate of sexual freedom and experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

Largely self-taught, Wong's paintings ranged from gritty renderings of the decaying Lower East Side to playful depictions of New York's and San Francisco's Chinatowns, to Traffic Signs for the Hearing Impaired.

While they lived together, Wong produced a significant body of work that he eventually displayed in his exhibition Urban Landscapes at Barry Blinderman's Semaphore Gallery in 1984.

[11] Their collaborative paintings often combined Piñero's poetry or prose with Wong's painstaking cityscapes and stylized fingerspelling.

[14] Curator Sofie Krogh Christensen called this work a "eulogy to the multilingual community of the Lower East Side and its protagonists" for its use of multiple perspectives through text - the graffiti art of Little Ivan, Piñero's poem, and Wong's own sign language message on the frame - to memorialize the rapidly changing neighborhood.

"[16] Wong exemplified "a tourist idea, an outsider's view" of Chinatown that was prevalent for those distant from the reality of the city.

[17] For a time in the 1980s, he made ends meet by buying underpriced antiquities at Christie's and selling them at Sotheby's for a fairer price.

Among his collection were pieces from 1980s New York-based graffiti artists, including Rammellzee, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Lady Pink, and Lee Quiñones.

"[1] In 1999 and 2000, Wong's mother as the executor of his estate donated the bulk of his papers and ephemera to New York University's Fales Library.

[22] The Bronx Museum of the Arts organized a posthumous retrospective of Wong's work in 2016, curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Yasmin Ramírez.

[25][26] In 2022, the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Madrid, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, organized a touring retrospective of Wong's work, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, the artist's first museum retrospective in Europe, curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez Rubio.