Zachary Fisher Buehner (b.1980)

Zac Buehner has been active since the late 1990’s, as artist, graffiti writer and fabricator. He was raised in downtown New York City to artist parents and (to the dismay of his teachers) has been drawing obsessively since childhood. He moved from drawing on paper to painting on walls, and by 1998 he established himself in the New York graffiti scene. In his final year of high-school he and his friends began documenting their graffiti exploits and made a series of films from the footage, including their experimental short “Train of Thought” which premiered at the Brooklyn Film Festival a year after they graduated.

By 2004 he completed a BA in Fine Art from Hampshire College. Buehner’s main focus at Hampshire was in site-specific installation projects made to intentionally blur the lines of conventional exhibition. With his final thesis project he opted out of gallery presentation altogether; instead he constructed a self-contained studio within his studio, transforming his workspace into the project itself. Rather than framing work for display, he made a display of his life as the work. He made every object within the space, from the furniture, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, right down to the hand-forged door handle used to enter. And all was done in secret until the reveal on opening day. The result was a space filled with the private workings of an artist left to create uninhibited.

Buehner had other fascinations while at Hampshire, including black-smithing and metal craft, which has been his ‘bread and butter’ ever since. He also expanded a love for making music in those years, and collaborated with friends to form Third Person, a trio exploring the potential of sample-based electronic music. Eventually they were commissioned to compose scores for several independent films, most notably for Word.Life (The Hip-Hop Project) from Bruce Willis and Queen Latifa - premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2006.   

Post graduation, he stayed on in Massachusetts to work full-time as studio assistant for Tom Friedman. This was during Friedman’s transition from the gallery that built his career to more prominent representation. After two and a half years of working under Friedman, Buehner left to pursue his own art. He moved into his then-studio at an abandoned rubber factory in Holyoke MA and lived as an artist squatter, and spent the next 8 years doing custom metalwork in frequent collaboration with friends. He kept up with his interest in art, music, and graffiti, even as he began wrestling with bi-polar issues. Over time this became a focus of his art.

By 2009 Buehner was showing his work regularly, and had his first major group exhibition “Young Collectors” at Leila Heller Gallery NYC in 2013. Two of his works on exhibit were sold before the opening; from there he was invited to do a public Q&A with Miguel Benavides, which in turn led to his graffiti related short story “The Ascent” being published in Studio International. While based in Holyoke he spent the next two years working with art consultant Diana Burroughs doing a number of small shows around New York, and a series of private commissions for collectors. In 2015 he moved to S. Korea, and within a year, had his first solo show, “Hide” at [B] Space gallery, Daegu, before relocating to Vietnam.

Since the move, Buehner has sought to establish himself once again as an artist in a new city, teaching art, doing small group shows, and custom metalwork. His Vietnam solo debut “enTropical” opened at Room Saigon, 2019. After which he branched into art consultancy, and went on to form a long-term collaborative relationship with creative agency, Ki Saigon. Together they did projects featured in F@st Company , and Design Boom, and were shortlisted for a prestigious DandAD award, before finally winning a London International Award for their “Peace Project” in 2021. He has continued to do public projects in Saigon, as well as custom metalwork for notable bars and restaurants throughout the city.

Currently Buehner is developing a new series of work planned as an installation, reinvigorating his earlier interests. This includes sculpture, paintings, and photo constructions that tie together as a personal diary. At the heart of the project is a tribute to his close friend who died tragically from Fentanyl in 2020. Through the making of this project he has found ways to reflect on and process great loss - from the lows of deep grief to the highs of a reverence for life that came from confronting death.