Home » Entertainment » An Uptown Cat Became a Chinese Artist. Then He Returned Home.
An Uptown Cat Became a Chinese Artist. Then He Returned Home.
04/14/2023
People weren’t quite sure what to make of Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. when, like some kind of prodigal son, he came back to New York in 2016, after making a life in Beijing.
His family had long known he was a wanderer, ever since he went to boarding school at his own insistence at age 11. But in the graduate art program at Hunter College, where Payano showed up on his return from China — older than most classmates, with a prior M.F.A., exhibition history and collectors — he stood out.
There was his style, for one. A painter and sculptor interested in hybrids of the two forms, Payano arrived at Hunter with a talent for fine-detailed realism in a recognizably Chinese tradition. His visual language mixed figuration and grand landscapes with recurring surrealistic motifs.
Most of all, there was the journey that shaped him. Payano moved to China right after college and lived in Beijing continuously for 15 years. He attended China’s top art school. He married a Chinese woman. He had a studio in the city. He spoke fluent Mandarin, with a Beijing accent.
A pure Uptown cat — Dominican American, raised on 191st Street in the heart of Washington Heights — Payano had become, to all intents and purposes, a Chinese artist.
“I’m a Sinophile,” Payano said flatly, when we met recently. “I became an artist in China.” But now here he was, at 42, with his Hunter degree complete, in a temporary studio in the Bronx, making works for “Out From,” his new exhibition at the Charles Moffett gallery in SoHo.
The show, his second with the gallery, continues his reintroduction to an American art world that had become foreign to him. So the work is also a document of return, marked by the experiences and emotions gathered on the voyage.
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