FONKi

Artistic Influences

FONKi had various artistic influences. He draws inspiration from graffiti culture and hip-hop music as well as Cambodian history and culture, from the Middle Ages to the modern era. He was also inspired by European Classical art and portrait painting. FONKi has adopted Cambodian art standards and European art of the past to create works firmly anchored in modern culture and urban art.

He considers himself to be part of the artistic movement of the Khmer renaissance, which began at the beginning of the 2010s.

Early Life and Education

FONKi was born in Paris to Cambodian refugee parents who were escaping the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s (see Cambodian or Khmer Community in Canada). When he was four and a half, his family moved to Montreal. As a child, he loved to draw and was passionate about comics. His family encouraged him to explore his creative interests. His father was passionate about photography, and his mother loved watercolors. Moreover, he had several cousins involved in the arts, such as actress Elodie Yung. At the age of eight, he was introduced to the art of graffiti for the first time by a mural done by Alex Scaner, one of the pioneers of Montreal graffiti. At the time, graffiti was illegal in Montreal, but Scaner and other artists had succeeded in making a career out of it for private clients. The police visited FONKi's school to discourage students from making graffiti, but that only served to intensify the appeal of this art form for the budding young artist. At the age of 11, during a visit to France, he was fascinated by the graffiti in French subways.

Later, FONKi's family moved to the Montreal neighborhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. It was there, at age 15, that a classmate introduced him to artists in the Montreal artistic graffiti scene. That was when he chose the artist name FONKi, inspired by the rap group from Marseille, Fonky Family. He carried out his first paid graffiti art projects for various local clients - he painted murals for a café, his school's playground, and his dentist's office.

In 2009, FONKi received a college diploma in visual arts from Cégep du Vieux-Montréal (See also Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEP) in Quebec.) There, he discovered classical European art and learned to paint in a classical style with a can of spray paint. He continued his studies at Concordia University in animation, but left the program in 2013 to focus on his artistic career.

Early Career

Shocked by the death of three influential Montreal graffiti artists in a train accident in November 2010, FONKi decided to concentrate on murals rather than animation. While he was still in school, he began to exhibit a few of his murals throughout Montréal in pop-up exhibitions, that is, temporary and generally immersive solo and group exhibits. In 2012, the artist co-founded the urban modern art collective MTL ZOO. In 2013, MTL ZOO worked with the first edition of Montreal's MURAL festival. The artists organized closing parties, created murals, and made decorations for the festival. FONKi continued to be involved in putting on the MURAL festival in the years that followed.

Breakthrough With The Roots Remain

IN 2012, FONKi was awrded a four-month artist residency in Phnom Penh. During his stay in Cambodia, he and some friends filmed the documentary The Roots Remain. Returning to the country of his ancestors, the artist filmed his reacquaintance with the culture and his family history. He found the body of his paternal grandfather ― killed during the Khmer Rouge genocide. He also conducted research into his family records. FONKi discovered a Cambodia in full transition, where the young generation was trying to rebuild the country in the aftermath of the genocide. In Phnom Penh, he painted a mural in the kbach style – a traditional Cambodian architectural decoration style – which displays the members of his family killed during the genocide. With this film, he wanted to show the mural to his parents so that his family could heal from the wounds of the past.

The documentary premiere took place in 2015 during the Cambodia Town Film Festival in Long Beach, California ― the city with the largest Cambodian community in the world outside of Cambodia itself. That year, The Roots Remain was selected for several film festivals in North America and Cambodia. The film won several awards, including the Magnus-Isacsson Award, given to films showcasing social conscience, and the Women Inmates' Award, both presented by the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) in 2015. He also received the award for best film at the Victoria Film Festival in 2016, and the DocsMX award for the top 10 of the decade, given at the 2021 International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City. (See also Film Festivals.)

In 2015, the RIDM Women Inmates' award gave FONKi the opportunity to offer graffiti workshops to women’s prisons in Canada and elsewhere in the world. He also held graffiti workshops in schools.

In 2014, FONKi returned to Cambodia to film the sequel to The Roots Remain, a website entitled FONKi World. He filmed his encounters with local artists who are on the verge of revolutionizing the Cambodian art scene and created new murals.

The FT Gallery at the Factory Phnom Penh, Murals for Cambodia Festival, and Current Projects

In his twenties, FONKi continued to travel between Cambodia, Canada, and France for his numerous art projects. In 2018, he decided to stay in Cambodia to paint and hold an exhibition.

In 2020, he became the owner and curator of the FT Gallery at the Factory Phnom Penh, a contemporary art gallery. In 2022, he founded the Murals for Cambodia festival to celebrate the country's hip-hop culture and urban art. Through this festival, he invited international artists and artists from southeast Asia to exhibit their art in the FT Gallery. The artists also had the opportunity to paint in the Cambodian jungle and to meet with students at local schools.

In 2022, FONKi completed the largest mural of his career, Dream, Hunt, Make, on one of the buildings of Middlesex Community College, in the state of Massachusetts, in the US.

During the 2023 Southeast Asian Games, the FT Gallery organized an exposition with several artists in the region. In the same year, FONKi unveiled his painting Le Triomphe du Cambodge, a "remixed" version of a work by the Italian painter Pompeo Batoni, for the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism. Also in 2023, he presented the king of Cambodia, His Majesty Norodom Sihamoni, with a portrait that he had painted of the king.

In 2025, to celebrate his 20-year career, FONKi exhibited some of his works in a pop-up exhibition at the first Festival Champa in Montréal.