Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Woo-Woo / Liang Hao: Pacing the Void

From May 18 to September 8, 2024, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents the exhibitions Liang Hao: Pacing the Void and Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Woo-Woo, each of which marks the artist’s first institutional solo show.

Liang Hao: Pacing the Void features more than 50 sculptures, including two series in wood and a new plaster series commissioned by UCCA. A culmination of her decades-long career in sculpture, this exhibition traces the chronological progression of her efforts in exploring the relationship between non-representational form, materiality, and space, and pays tribute to her unique creative practice unencumbered by the limitations of national borders, gender, and a linear view of history. The title of the exhibition “Pacing the Void” refers to the process of the sculptor’s body constantly, physically moving through space as she works, while alluding to the artist’s way of life as she traverses different cultures and countries over the years without belonging to any one locale. This also echoes the artist’s own reflection on her body of work: “The world offers us the possibility of discovery, of moving in the unknown, while space allows for our endless imagination … Rather than emptiness, the void is a free space without any restrictions. Light, line, surface, and form all exist in this infinite space, and they are constantly changing.”

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Woo-Woo includes works made throughout the artist’s twenty-year career. As a Black, Sinophone, Dominican-American from New York who was artistically trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Payano saturates his works with multicultural and multilingual concepts and explorations. This cross-cultural influence is manifested in his work through a keen sense of color, 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. In line with Payano’s passion for linguistics, the title “Woo-Woo” is a bilingual pun in Chinese and English. In English, it refers to “unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.” This word is thought to have originated in the 1980s, and to mimic the imagined sounds of wailing ghosts. In Chinese, the two characters, which roughly mean “awakening/enlightenment” and “object/thing” are not commonly seen together, but might refer to intelligent materials, or to sentient beasts. Payano sees this as a linguistic, and thus a cultural, point of convergence, abundance, cross-pollination, and collapse. In both substance and form, this exhibition portrays an artist and his epic journey of transcultural becoming.

Liang Hao: Pacing the Void is curated by UCCA curator Neil Zhang. Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Woo-Woo is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari. Exclusive wall solutions support is provided by Dulux. UCCA also thanks the members of UCCA Foundation Council, International Circle, and Young Associates, as well as Lead Partner Aranya, Lead Art Book Partner DIOR, Presenting Partner Bloomberg, and Supporting Partners Barco, Dulux, Genelec, and Stey.