Hervé Yamguen

Hervé Yamguen (born June 17, 1971, in Douala, Cameroon) is a Cameroonian multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, writer, photographer, performer, and scenographer whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, public art, poetry, and theatrical set design. Based in Douala, where he was born and continues to live and work, Yamguen has developed a practice over more than three decades that moves fluidly between the visual and literary arts. Although largely self-taught, he later undertook a year of training at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 2000–01.  At the center of Yamguen’s work is an imaginative world in which distinctions between human, animal, vegetal, spiritual, and cosmic life become unstable. Birds, trees, flowers, hybrid heads, lovers, faces, bodies, masks, and dreamlike creatures recur across his paintings and sculptures. His bronze figures often merge human bodies with branches, birds, plants, or other forms, turning metamorphosis into a way of visualizing interdependence.  Yamguen describes his practice as emerging from a stream of consciousness and from a desire to move beyond ordinary material reality toward the invisible forces connecting living beings. His work is informed by animist understandings of the world, spirituality, dreams, eroticism, poetry, memory, and a sense of wonder toward everyday existence.  Yamguen is also deeply connected to the cultural ecology of New Bell, the Douala neighborhood in which he has lived and worked. In 1998, with Salifou Lindou, Hervé Youmbi, Blaise Bang, and Jules Wokam, he co-founded Cercle Kapsiki, a collective devoted to intervening in Douala's urban environment and creating spaces for artistic exchange. The group later established K Factory, combining a contemporary-art space with an interdisciplinary residency program. Yamguen's public projects—including Néons d’Amour, Les mots écrits de New-Bell, and, with Hervé Youmbi, Les Fables du calao—bring poetry, visual art, sound, and community participation directly into streets and neighborhoods.  His work has been shown internationally at institutions including the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, Hamburger Bahnhof–Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, S.M.A.K., doual’art, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, and Cité internationale des arts, as well as at international fairs including 1-54, AKAA, Art Brussels, Untitled Art Miami, and artgenève. His works have entered the collections of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and S.M.A.K. He currently has a solo exhibition, Nos géographies intimes, at AFIKARIS in Paris, on view September 5–October 31, 2026.