Saint-Étienne Yeanzi is a visual artist, educator, and cultural project promoter, born in Katiola (Côte d’Ivoire) in 1988. He currently lives and works between Abidjan and Paris.“My task as an artist is to be a mirror of society, representing the attitudes, the habits and the shortcomings of this society. If you like, I am kind of repository of culture and collective memory, of the collective conscience” (Yeanzi, 2021). A graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts of Abidjan, where he graduated top of his class in 2012, Yeanzi received formal training in both painting and photography. Over the years, he has established himself as one of the most significant figures in contemporary African art of the past decade.

Deeply influenced by the humanities, particularly philosophy, history, and psycho-sociology, his work explores questions of identity, the construction of the self, and the evolution of human societies. His artistic practice investigates how individuals and communities are shaped by memory, history, and social transformation. Yeanzi’s approach is also defined by a strong interest in material experimentation and technical hybridity. He works with a wide range of materials and media, including melted plastic, fabric, plexiglass, wood, paper, PVC, photography, screen printing, collage, pictograms, calligraphic characters, and ideograms. This diversity of materials reflects his belief that technique is never an end in itself, but a tool serving the concept, where form emerges from societal change and critical questioning. A passionate observer of street art, Yeanzi also developed his practice through nearly a decade of work as a commissioned portrait painter, which contributed to his strong technical foundation and sensitivity to representation.

Since 2013, his research has unfolded through a series of major bodies of work—Persona (2013), Projections (2016), Colloquium (2018), Somnium (2023), and Écosystème (2024)—all part of a broader conceptual framework he defines as the “Identitarian Question.” This ongoing research examines personality, community, and historical memory, questioning how identities are formed within the context of social development and collective history. In his practice, Yeanzi often melts plastic and reconfigures industrial materials to create faces, silhouettes, and hybrid scenes, oscillating between the real and the surreal. He made his debut at the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat (2017) as part of the exhibition “Afrique en Capital.” In 2022, his work represented the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, and he also participated in the 14th Dak’art Biennale, further consolidating his position as a key figure in contemporary African art discourse.