During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indigenous Andeans meticulously decorated wooden objects using a unique plant resin known as barniz de Pasto or mopa mopa. Focusing on these objects, the dissertation identifies and subverts the epistemic asymmetries at play when we analyze Indigenous production in colonial contexts. I explore these asymmetries through two main axes of inquiry. The first revolves around the mopa mopa technique and how it was conceptualized by natives and Europeans. My analysis of the process for making images with mopa resin, which included chewing to clean it and mix in pigments, allows me to show how cultural understandings of the body alter the meaning of artistic processes. Even though this is not painting in a technical sense, colonial authors often referred to mopa images as pinturas (paintings). Investigating the mismatch between the technique and its colonial descriptor, I argue that native media pushed the boundaries of European artistic concepts and unravel the epistemic underpinning of the word pintura in the colonial Hispanic context. The second axis of inquiry deals with the geographical trajectories involved in making these objects. On a local level, I show how the bodily experience of those trajectories is intimately related to the configuration of the northern Andes as a colonial territory. On a global level, I situate the production of these objects in the transatlantic and transpacific webs of early modern trade, highlighting indigenous agency in the enterprise of producing objects for the Spanish and Creole markets and foregrounding little-studied trade routes through the Amazon and up the Andes.