Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Single-Celled Humans

BANK is pleased to announce that Payano’s first solo show Single-Celled Humans in the VAULT. Payano’s visual arts practice spans his biographical imprints and multicultural heritages that rise to the surface of his “heavy collages” of visual renderings in painting, ready-made objects, image, collage and sculpture. Working between studios in China and United States, Payano weaves rich symbolism with a complex transcontinental narrative that forms his personal lexicon.

Within Payano’s visual world of play, he offers a continued search to ultimately simplify, dismantle and disrupt the human body – arriving at mouthed peaches, referred to as single-celled stand ins for humans. Floating against unpolluted backgrounds of light-filled, worlds that pulsate between the edges, the peaches’ anthropomorphic mouths are frozen, silenced in expressive positions. Viewers are guided into these worlds through inarticulate communications by the peaches that acknowledge a viewer’s existence yet one fails to decipher precisely what is said. However, as with humans, peaches possess delicate outer skins that may be ruptured to reveal deeper vulnerabilities in appearance and spirit.

The multimedia works resist singular interpretations and probes a merging of diverse cultures the artist simultaneously experiences as both native and foreign. As Payano navigates geographic locations foreign to himself, the artist, a Sinophile, heightens his awareness of language as a crucial bridge connecting people. While having faithfully become an artist whilst living in Beijing for nearly two decades, Payano’s unique vision reconnects with his visual roots as a Dominican-American who grew up in Uptown New York, drawing compositional clues from graffiti and traditional Chinese art forms.

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. (b. 1980, New York, lives and works in Beijing) is an Afro- Caribbean visual artist. After completing his dual B.A. degree at Williams College in Chinese Language and Studio Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2003), Payano moved to Beijing, where he completed his M.F.A. in Oil Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (2008). He also obtained an M.F.A. degree in Studio Art from Hunter College, The City University of New York (2020). Having had the experience of navigating between different languages and cultures, Payano became increasingly attuned to the importance of language and its application in our understanding of and relation to one another. Though his works are mainly paintings in his earlier career, the artist has expanded his practice in recent years to embrace sculptural and quasi-sculptural forms with his distinctive peach-mouths joined with other images, textures, and found or assembled objects that form strange human- like portraits that fuse painting and sculpture. He had his first institutional show “Woo-Woo” in UCCA, Beijing, 2024 and recent group shows includes “This Basic Asymmetry” (Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California, USA, 2022) and “Ad-Diriyah Biennale: Feeling the Stones” (Saudi Arabia, 2021).