Fonki

Fonki
Also known as	FONKi; Yavana Chhem-Kieth; FONKi Yav
Roles	Visual artist
Active	since 2005
Based in	Cambodia
Website	https://fonki.ca/
Subjects	Visual Arts & Design; Migration & Diaspora; Film & Moving Image

Cambodian and French-Canadian graffiti artist and muralist who adapts Khmer ornament and lettering to street art.

Fonki (styled FONKi), whose name is Yavana Chhem-Kieth, is a Cambodian and French-Canadian graffiti artist and muralist based in Phnom Penh. He grew up in Montreal and began doing graffiti in 2005.

Work

Fonki created the first Khmer graffiti lettering in the kbach style, joining street lettering with the ornament of the frescoes and carvings of the Angkorian temples. His approach changed in the summer of 2012, when he returned to Cambodia to paint a large mural in memory of relatives killed in the genocide. That journey is the subject of the documentary The Roots Remain, which he co-produced.

He is the curator and owner of FT Gallery at Factory Phnom Penh, where he and Théo Vallier have managed the art space through FT Productions since April 2020, and he founded the Murals for Cambodia festival. In the summer of 2022 he painted Dream, Hunt, Make, a mural 81 feet wide and 82 feet tall on the Cowan Center of Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts, part of the ArtUp Lowell mural series. His murals are also in Cambodia, Canada, Mexico and other countries.

Interviews

Fonki was the guest of the second episode of The Threaded Path, "The Ancestral Echoes of Painting on Walls", released on September 12, 2026. CBC Arts has also followed him through Phnom Penh's art scene.

Works

• The Roots Remain (Film)

Appears in

• Fonki: The Ancestral Echoes of Painting on Walls (The Threaded Path, September 2026)

See also

• The Roots Remain
• The Threaded Path
• All creators