As China continues to nurture its soft power in the global cultural landscape, it welcomes a new addition to its legacy: a wave of foreign artists who have migrated to this alluring center stage. With his intuitive ability to absorb Chinese culture into his own, and reinterpreting it in a fresh perspective, Miguel Payano stands out amongst the group. The American Dominican artist’s fluency in the Chinese language, combined with his extensive study of its history and culture, had enabled him to fully acclimate to China’s rapidly changing environment. His love affair with the Chinese culture sinks deep into his works and enriches his imagination, originality and vivacity.
Much like his background, Payano’s Koicocks cannot be easily characterized as East nor West. Payano translates the qualities most celebrated in traditional Chinese Gongbi paintings, reinterpreting the majestic movement and poise of the creatures in his own visual language. Liveliness pours through his signature iridescent colors, unfolding schools of koi swimming theatrically behind audacious peacocks in carefully constructed configurations. Whether the Koicock is alone or in front of a lush landscape, simplistic in form or complex in interaction, each piece is exquisite in detail and a significant component in the development of the entire series.
In realizing Koicocks, Payano wanted to give meaning and life to a recurring imagination. Payano actualizes each detail in a cyclical practice of creation and destruction, learning and realization. The ethereal paintings emerge, shrouding many other versions the artist scraped in the process. Each Koicock evolves with time whilst the relationship of the peacock and koi also matures through the series when the two increasingly interact in poise and gaze. Payano’s elaborate research in peacocks and koi is manifested in the Koicocks’ details, rendering it to be real while its peculiar hybridity tugs at its viewers’ instinct to categorize it as a fantasy. The hybridity is bold and dynamic. Perhaps a symbolic reinterpretation of China’s surging wealth and affinity for the luxurious and extravagant, the combination of the kitsch icons is also suggestive of the marriage of wealth and power, fortune and abundance.
Payano obtained his Masters in Oil Painting in the Central Academy of Fines Arts in Beijing upon graduating from Williams College in the United States. The practice of combining two life forms in his work manifested from the beginning, when he first gained international recognition in 2009 through the Sovereign Schoeni Prize with tiger-man hybrid “Sha-boy”. His works have been exhibited in Hong Kong, Beijing, New York, Massachusetts and Italy. The artist lives and works in Beijing.
Image: © Miguel Payano, LDX Gallery
