**MIGUEL ÁNGEL PAYANO JR.**

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. (b. 1980, New York, New York; lives and works in the Bronx, New York. MFA Hunter College 2021, New York; MFA Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing 2008; BA Williams College 2003.) was born in an Afro-Caribbean family in New York and studied in New England before moving to China in his twenties, Payano has always had to navigate between and among several languages and cultures. Learning to communicate across these contexts, Payano became more and more attuned to the importance of language in our understanding of and relation to one another. Now living and working between New York and Beijing, the mouth-partial and potent-has become an anchoring image in Payano's practice. While earlier in his career Payano worked mostly in paint, in recent years he's expanded his practice to embrace sculptural and quasi-sculptural forms - with his peach-mouths joined by other images, textures, and found, transformed, and assembled objects that form strange human-like portraits that fuse painting and sculpture. Charles Moffett's representation of Payano follows a series of collaborations over the course of the last year, including a solo exhibition in early 2021 and a presentation at NADA Miami 2021.
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INTERVIEW WITH MIGUEL ÁNGEL PAYANO JR. BY LAURA DAY WEBB

Your life has taken you from an Afro-Caribbean upbringing in New York, to New England, and then to Beijing — each with its own language and cultural codes. How have these geographic and cultural crossings shaped your sense of identity, and how do they inform the visual language of your work?

Language and culture are very closely linked. They are instrumental to how we all structure our own thoughts and fundamental for human socialization. I think of language and culture as essentially the agreed upon operating system among a people. So when one truly learns another language and culture, it’s enriching, expansive, and transformative. Personally, as I’ve lived my life across these different languages and cultures, it’s radically expanded my connections with others, my ability to feel myself in another, and I suppose my empathy. That said, this feeling sometimes can be an unrequited camaraderie, depending on where I’m living. I can certainly still appear out of place.

Speaking to the ways these experiences have informed the visual language of my artistic practice, I think they’ve fostered the often uncommon associations I create within my work, seeing an overlap between graffiti tags and Cao-Shu calligraphy, or feeling a little overwhelmed by the choice between “form through line” or “form through volume,” or a hyper-awareness of brush bristle position and stroke gestures while using oils. But in all honesty, regarding how these cultural crossings inform my visual language, I feel like I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface.

The carved peach-mouth is such a distinctive and recurring motif in your recent pieces. What first drew you to the peach as a form, and how has its symbolism evolved for you, especially in the context of your own health and mortality?

**Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.**
Orchard’s Quintet : Moon Chorus, 2025
Mixed media on panel
12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Photo by Thomas Barratt, courtesy Charles Moffett.

Earlier on in Beijing, there were a few years where I was primarily working with ink to make figural drawings. I eventually started experimenting with reducing the figure into calligraphy, essentially “writing” a person as a word. Later on when I returned to oils, I not only tried incorporating calligraphic mark making, but the impetus to further reduce the figure continued, eventually bringing most of my focus to the mouth. I painted my first mouthed-peach in 2017. This was a few years before my diagnosis, so health wasn't on my mind. At that time, I was thinking about race, culture, and language, and simple animals, single-celled organisms. In China, since even before the Han Dynasty, the peach has had an association with longevity, but generally speaking in many parts of East Asia, the peach is THE magical fruit. There is abundant folklore about peaches. So when the isolated mouth in my paintings needed a body, the magical mammalian-like fuzzy fruit with a bum was ready. Therefore from its beginning until now, the mouthed-peach has not changed much. Though their worlds are expanding and their lives are richer, the peaches can now sing and whistle, juggle and smoke, cry and laugh, and much more, they are still “single-celled” humans. However, an element of my work that has opened and changed for me are the cast hands, my hands. My first health concerns began with almost imperceptible tremors in my right hand; it was around this time that I began casting my hands. In hindsight, it seems so obvious, but at the time I thought casting my hands was simply a formalistic decision. Now I think it was my subconscious exerting agency over my body, a literal stilling of my hands. As my illness progresses, what my hands embody expands — fear and vulnerability, courage and fortitude, the fleeting and the enduring. The obstacle has become the way, shout-out to Marcus Aurelius.

You began primarily as a painter, but your practice has radically expanded to include sculpture, casting, and found objects. What catalyzed this shift, and how has working in three dimensions changed your relationship with storytelling and portraiture?

In 2016, after a decade and a half of living in Beijing, I returned to New York for graduate school. I wasn’t fully aware of how isolated I had been from the New York art world until then. I started voraciously visiting exhibitions, often checking out over a dozen shows in one round through different gallery districts. What I came to realize then was that the work that truly stopped me, the work with the “umph!”, was often not straight painting, but more frequently mixed-media work. I had returned to New York in search of change, but it turned out to be a demolition and rebuild project. I was still very interested in object making, but no longer so tightly tethered to painting. I began experimenting with all kinds of materials from raw chicken thighs and infinity mirrors to making my own paint and woodworking. I finally understood that there were no material limits, which raised the question: if anything goes, then how does one choose what medium to use? In response, I started to think about material like language; material can function like words and conjure specific schema. Words don’t have fixed dimensions, though they have core meanings, their peripheries are more nebulous and can trigger different associations depending on the culture. I can illustrate this with supposedly equivalent words across languages. We see this “🍑” for instance and may say peach in the US and 桃子 in China, but while those words certainly have overlap in meaning—the fruit—they are not equivalents. In the US you see “🍑” and perhaps associate it with Georgia; in China, you may associate it with the Monkey King. However, both associations seem random and unrelated in the other cultural context. This linguistic observation sparked a sensibility that I began to apply to material selection. Words are not simply their core meanings; words are also the associations they trigger, and materials can function similarly.

There’s a striking tension in your work between permanence and impermanence — especially in the live-cast limbs, which seem to both freeze and resist time. Can you talk about how your personal journey has influenced this exploration of the body, time, and memory in your art?

The tension is indeed there, though I really can’t take conscious credit for it. As I mentioned, I began casting my hands around the onset of my tremors, unaware that my anxiety was creeping into the work. But yes, a life-cast is quite different from carved wood or marble hands or bronzed hands. The process is more personal and “immediate,” but also less precious. When making the heavy-collages (painting, collage, and sculptural portraits), I tend to work out multiple hand postures fairly quickly. From a production perspective, casting my own hands is very practical—my hands are readily available and production time is short and relatively inexpensive—so I can experiment and take risks with minimal loss. From a personal perspective, casting my hands is almost like a cataloging of my Parkinson’s progression, sculptural markers of a point in time. However, as the artwork develops, the hands stop being my own and instead transform into the body of the emerging figure. Similarly, the mouths of the peaches come from the casts of many different people—family, friends, associates, and my own. Yet over time, the identity of the nascent portrait eclipses the identity of the mouth’s source, decoupling the memory of the original person from the body double.

*Out From* at Charles Moffett, 2023. Photos by Thomas Barratt. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.

Your use of flattened perspective, cloud and wave motifs, and symbolic layering clearly reflect an engagement with traditional Asian art. How has your time in China altered your visual syntax, and how do you reconcile or resist the conventions of both Eastern and Western art histories in your work?

The short answer is that I’m still working on it. Yes, Asian art—but primarily ancient and old Chinese art—is a great source of inspiration that I regularly reference and study. Recently in March, I visited numerous sites in Shanxi Province as well as the Dunhuang Grottoes in Gansu Province. I was predominantly examining multi-dynastic Buddhist sculpture and murals. The trip was visually bountiful, and hopefully, it will lead to some new moves in the studio. In terms of Western art history, I am more inspired by modern and contemporary artists. I don't long to live in the time of the great “masters,” but there’s still a lot to learn from history, from world art. Not too long ago, “World Art History” meant European and American art history. While I certainly have enjoyed and continue to enjoy Western art, to limit my scope solely to these regions is myopic. I aspire or attempt to have a more global tap into the art history of our species. At the risk of sounding naively kumbaya, I think we would be in a better place if we saw “their” art history, whether in the global south or global north, as “our” history. Returning to the crux of the question—Eastern and Western art conventions, to reconcile or resist—what I resist, or rather what I’m now incapable of, is solely referencing a single art history. Half of my life in China has fundamentally changed me; it’s a part of me now.

The title of your latest exhibition at Charles Moffett, “Out From,” seems to speak to emergence, rupture, and expansion — both formally and conceptually. What are you hoping viewers take away from this show, especially as they move through its multidimensional, boundary-breaking spaces?

I must say these are sniper questions. Thank you. Emergence, rupture, and expansion…yes, yes, yes! With that exhibition, I was focused on bringing all of those energies into the gallery—creating collaged elements that mimicked and extended the content of the paintings, sculptural elements that broke the plane of the painted panel, and cutouts that extended past the two-dimensional rectangular parameters of the painting. For a very long time now, I have been interested in the threshold between the painting and the viewer. In my early work, I first asked, “How do we get ‘inside’ the painting?” Later the questioning expanded to "How does the painting come out?” Now I wish to maintain the limbo of pulling the viewer in and pushing the painting out. In the exhibition, these were ongoing themes and tricks suggested by painted distant landscapes, minute details and Easter eggs hidden in the sculptures and behind the panels, as well as mirrored surfaces that reflected and lured the viewer in. I hoped the show impressed on viewers instances of mystery and illusion, levity and curiosity, and moments when their thoughts were silenced by the viewing of something truly novel.

FEATURED WORK

Interview with Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.