People weren’t quite sure what to make of Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. when, like some kind of prodigal son, he came back to New York in 2016, after making a life in Beijing. His family had long known he was a wanderer, ever since he went to boarding school at his own insistence at age 11. But in the graduate art program at Hunter College, where Payano showed up on his return from China — older than most classmates, with a prior M.F.A., exhibition history and collectors — he stood…
An Uptown Cat Became a Chinese Artist. Then He Returned Home.
