Klau

Graffiti Air Jordan - 36"x24"

2017

Klau grew up in Harlem, NY and later Brooklyn, NY. His artwork is influenced by the inner city urban hip hop and street culture. Klau has been working successfully in the commercial and industrial marketing and sales industry for the last 20 years. Much of his iconic imagery was created from the struggle of not having the means to fit in. Being a Chinese-American implant, living in poverty in the early 1980's, Air Jordans were out of his reach. Keng was given the slave name: “Chicken Wing” and the cultural mind set was, if one did not have brand name clothing, one was an outcast. His peers created a hierarchy based on having the best “threads” and “kicks” and only then one was respected. Klau found a way to survive and adapt through hard work and artistic creations and he labels his work as Iconicism; showing both a celebration and extreme criticism of American cultures as it pertains to his life, and relevant effects of popularity, and how unattainable it was to a child of poverty.