Miguel Ángel Payano Jr at UCCA Beijing

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr opens Woo-Woo, his first solo museum exhibition, at UCCA Beijing. Displaying artworks from the breadth of the artist’s career, the show demonstrates how Payano’s practice has developed under the influence of Chinese art over the past two decades.

Unit extends many congratulations to Miguel Ángel Payano Jr on the opening of his first institutional solo show ‘Woo-Woo’ at UCCA Beijing, China’s leading contemporary art institution.

The gallery were proud to have loaned multiple works from Payano’s 2023 solo show with Unit, Limbguistics, to UCCA for the exhibition.

Curated by the director of UCCA Philip Tinari, Woo-Woo displays the progression of Payano’s artistic journey in China, beginning from him processing influences of a foreign culture to today, when he now speaks Mandarin fluently with a Beijing accent. However the artist confirms, “My ways of thinking and making decisions, my tastes, and my attitudes are all inherent to my Afro-Caribbean background and my upbringing in uptown New York.”

As a means of documenting this process, the exhibition is organised symmetrically, with Payano’s earlier work displayed near the entrance, and the more recent, monumental paintings in the centre. As audiences move toward the central space, they will see how Payano’s practice has developed under the influence of Chinese art across his different series.

Payano has a truly transcontinental footprint. Born into an Afro-Carribean family, he was raised in New York City, educated in New England, artistically trained in Beijing, and has actively worked between China and the US since the early-2000s. This multitude of experience has shaped his unique artistic language, full of linguistic cues and visual puns.

Even the title of this exhibition, Woo-Woo, is a bilingual pun in Chinese and English. In English, “woo-woo” refers to unconventional beliefs, and is often used in a dismissive sense to diminish credence in spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine. In Chinese however, the two characters roughly mean “awakening/enlightenment (悟)” and “object/thing (物)”, yet are not commonly seen together. Payano sees this as a linguistic, and thus a cultural, point of convergence, that might refer to intelligent materials, or to sentient beasts. The whimsical alchemy of cultures meeting is not just a subject for his paintings, but a deeply felt part of his life as a Black, Sinophone, Dominican-American artist.

In a statement UCCA describe Payano’s work as, “Saturated with multicultural and multilingual concepts and explorations. This cross-cultural influence is manifested as a keen sense of colour, figuration, and composition. His work includes painting as well as what he calls “heavy collage” where sculptural elements and readymade objects populate and protrude from canvases literally bursting with possible meanings.”

The “heavy collages” in this exhibition show off some of Payano’s most popular motifs, including white casts of his own hands and his signature peach mouthpieces.

Portraying an epic journey of transnational becoming, ‘Woo-Woo’ runs until 8 September 2024