Hervé Youmbi

Hervé Youmbi (born March 25, 1973, in Bangui, Central African Republic) is a Cameroonian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, power, colonialism, the commodification of African art, and the shifting boundary between ritual tradition and contemporary global art. Working across installation, portraiture, hybrid masks, video, beadwork-based projects, and collaborative ceremonial forms, Youmbi examines how African visual traditions circulate, are categorized, and are transformed across local communities, museums, and international markets.  After his family returned to Cameroon and settled in Douala, Youmbi began formal art study as a teenager. He attended the Institut de Formation Artistique in Mbalmayo from 1993 to 1996 and later pursued practice and research at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg from 2000 to 2001. His work often engages portraiture, Grassfields ritual traditions, leadership, colonial history, and the global art market, using collaboration with carvers, beaders, ritual specialists, and performers to create hybrid masks and installations that challenge fixed ideas of what counts as “traditional” or “contemporary” African art.  His work has been shown in major international contexts including Skulptur Projekte Münster, the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations. He is also one of the founding members of Cercle Kapsiki, an artist collective established in 1998 in Cameroon. Hervé Youmbi lives and works in Douala.