KIM WAN
Kim Wan (b. 1970) is a British artist of East Asian Polynesian and Western European heritage whose practice spans graffiti, painting, digital media, and large-scale installations. He began developing his signature graffiti style in the early 1980s under the tag SYNCRO ART and is recognized as one of the pioneering first-generation artists of the British Hip Hop scene. The speed, energy, and graphic power of spray-painting remain a defining influence throughout his career.
Classically trained, Wan is a consummate painter whose versatility extends across mediums. His work encompasses impastoed self-portraits, painted found objects incorporated into major installations, and experimental digital compositions—all unified by a painterly sensibility that grounds his diverse practice. His diptychs, often pairing a self-portrait with a graphic work, embody the tension at the core of his art where personal excavation meets cultural commentary. “In the self-portraits, I feel I’m ripping the ghost from my psyche, using my hand and eye to look,” he notes. In contrast, the graphic works fuse fine art with graffiti, designed to communicate directly with the viewer’s nervous system.
Wan’s influences range from the London School—Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon—to the bold visual language of 1980s DC and Marvel comic books, alongside his formative engagement with the graffiti movement, first sparked by the landmark book Subway Art. Across these references, his work investigates how identity, memory, and cultural lineage can be reimagined through painterly and graphic vocabularies.
Wan has collaborated with leading UK institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the National Gallery. Internationally, he has been selected by the Florence Biennale’s international committee, is represented in the Saatchi Collection, and has exhibited widely, with shows in New York, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, and Paris—including at the Louvre. His practice continues to evolve as a bridge between past and present, identity and abstraction, fine art and street culture.
