Hervé Yamguen

Hervé Yamguen was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1971, and lives and works in the city’s New Bell neighbourhood. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, writing, photography, performance, and scenography. Largely self-taught, he began painting in his late teens and later spent a year studying at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. He is also a founding member of the Cercle Kapsiki, an artists’ collective established in 1998 to promote artistic interventions in urban and public spaces. Writing has been an important dimension of Yamguen’s practice from the beginning. His literary and visual work developed alongside one another, with poetry and text frequently entering into dialogue with painting, sculpture, and performance. His practice has also extended into photography and public interventions, as well as the creation of stage designs for theatre. Rather than separating these different forms of expression, Yamguen approaches them as interconnected ways of exploring identity, memory, imagination, and the relationship between human beings and their surroundings. A recurring feature of his work is the presence of hybrid and metamorphic figures in which human, animal, and vegetal forms intersect. Birds, plants, faces, and bodies become part of a poetic visual language that reflects on the connections between humans, nature, and the animal world. These transformations also introduce spiritual and mythological dimensions into his images, allowing everyday experience to coexist with ancestral and imaginary realms. Yamguen has also developed projects that directly engage with the social and cultural life of Douala. For *Les Mots Écrits de New Bell*, presented through doual’art, he created a series of six mural installations using neon lights, tile mosaics, mirrors, iron rods, and painting. The project was developed in collaboration with local rappers Picsou and Moctomoflar and involved young people and residents of the Ngangué neighbourhood through performances and discussion meetings. Fragments of the rappers’ texts were subsequently incorporated into the façades of local buildings, bringing poetry and visual art into the public space of New Bell. Public space and collective artistic activity have remained important to Yamguen’s practice. Through the Cercle Kapsiki, he has participated in initiatives that sought to bring contemporary art into the urban environment, including the *Scénographies Urbaines* project. He has also contributed to educational and community-oriented artistic initiatives in Douala, working with other Cameroonian artists to introduce students to contemporary art and painting. Yamguen’s work has been exhibited in Cameroon and internationally, including in France, Germany, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Switzerland. In 2024, AFIKARIS presented *Les Mondes de l’Oiseau-Conteur*, his first major solo exhibition in Europe, celebrating three decades of artistic practice. His work has also been presented in exhibitions such as *Inhabiting the World* in Paris and *Les Mendiants de la Paix* at the Institut Français de Yaoundé. Rooted in Douala while engaging with broader cultural and artistic contexts, Yamguen’s practice brings together visual art, poetry, performance, and public intervention. His recurring exploration of transformation, spirituality, nature, and collective experience creates a poetic language in which human, animal, and vegetal forms are interconnected, while his engagement with the urban environment situates this imaginative world within the social and cultural realities of contemporary Cameroon.