Untitled (Anna May Wong Moticos)

Ray Johnson studied at Black Mountain College (1945-1948), where he met and worked with Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. When he moved to New York, he developed friendships with Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell, among other more famous artists. Johnson's work, reflecting these relationships, is a highly personal amalgam of geometric abstraction, pop, dada, surrealism, and conceptual art. Although he worked in a variety of media, he is celebrated for his complex collages that combine advertising, printed matter, hand lettered words or names, found objects, and his own drawings. These elements were cut, pasted, painted, sanded, and scraped. The contents are all recognizable, but are combined in a series of puns, riddles, and seeming free associations. The resulting collages invite visual and verbal decoding. 

Considered by many to be the father of "mail art," Johnson created and sent conceptual letters and documents across the country with instructions for the recipients, partially as a means to circumvent commercial galleries. He established the "New York Correspondence School" in 1962, a network of global collaborators who added to his mailings before sending them on. Meaning resided both in the creation of the work and in the circulation of it.

Many of his works relate to artists, actors, and other celebrities. In this case, he celebrates Anna May Wong, who starred in over 50 films between 1919 and 1960, sharing equal billing with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Marlene Dietrich. Wong, who was cast in roles that stereotyped Chinese womanhood, has been written out of film histories. Her outsider status, however, made her a favorite within gay culture. Johnson created a series of artworks devoted to Wong, including this collage, which includes a fan magazine style clipping, as well as the artist's own humorous calendar of Anna May, June, and July Wong.