Miguel Angel Payano Jr. (born in New York in 1980) is an Afro-Caribbean American artist working between Beijing and New York.
He took a double degree in Visual Arts and Chinese at Williams College in Massachusetts in 2003 before moving to China where he attended the famous Central Fine Arts Academy in Beijing, graduating in 2008.
After his move to Beijing in 2003 he became active on the local artistic scene. In 2009 he took part in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, where his work Sha-Boy won the Public Vote Prize. In 2020, Payano took a second degree in Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York, where he received the S&W scholarship. His works have been displayed in exhibitions all over the United States, and in Hong Kong, Germany, Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China. He has had solo shows of his work in: Bali, Indonesia (2015); the Williams College Wilde Gallery in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2014); the LDX Hong Kong Gallery, Hong Kong (2013); and the Central Fine Arts Academy in Beijing, China (2006). In 2021 he had a solo show at the Qi Mu Space in Beijing and was invited to display at the Ad-Diriyah Biennial in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of 2022 he was one of the artists selected for the exhibition This Basic Asymmetry at the Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art, and was chosen by the curator L. Ossei-Mensah for Ghost of Empires at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London.
