We’re looking forward to introducing you to KAANG. Check out our conversation below.
Hi KAANG, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
The most recent moment that made me feel proud was performing a set with this band called Few & Far Between. As a rapper I know a lot of people go to shows expecting just a rapper and beats playing over the PA, so it was a lot of fun to subvert that expectation. The set was electric. We were able to capture the audience and really have fun on stage, adding breakdowns to songs, getting hype with the crowd, it was amazing. Few & Far Between is an amazing band full of talented musicians, and they brought a new life to the music I asked them to learn. The rehearsals were hilarious, plus everyone gets along really well.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am an interdisciplinary artist. I am a producer, rapper, painter, illustrator, and DJ. I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a child and obsessed with music from around the same age. I was very lucky my mom, my only parent, was extremely supportive. She sacrificed a lot for me to be the artist I am today. She pushed me to apply to various art programs in LA, and aided me in persuing the violin in elementary school. Unfortunately it was too expensive to continue my music exploration at that time, so I just stuck to the visual side of things for a while. As highschool was going, things were difficult for us. I lived in different hotels with my mom and little brother for the whole of highschool, before parting ways at 17 after I graduated to see what I could do for myself and take stress off my mom.
Eventually, I went from being in a housing crisis with my family to being in the same crisis alone, while also being young and kind of dumb. I struggled with knowing what I needed and doing what made me feel free. I stumbled through years of poor decisions, substance abuse, and bad relationships–romantic and platonic. Hence a lot of my art is centered around growth through mistakes, addressing emotions attached to those events, and mental health. I am currently finishing up an album focused on the grief I felt after the passing of a friend and then my grandmother passing not too long after. It’s taken almost 3 years to get to this point with the album. Around 80% of the project was completed in terms of recording in 2023 at Spotify Studios, but I wasn’t ready to share it with the world. And now I am.
I think that is what makes my art and music unique. The raw emotion imbued into the work. The authenticity of existence gone awry is what infroms the piece.
Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
I had to let go of the belief that I knew exactly how my life was going to play out.
When I was in 3rd grade, I swore up and down I was going to be a famous comic artist and animator. The whole plan was there. At 12 I was– and still am– writing these comics, writting the connected tissue that made their universe, and trying to YouTube University my way into being an animator. I wanted to be Denys Cowan, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Tite Kubo, Masashi Kishimoto, and Hiroyuki Takei all wrapped into one. I was actively studying the greats of the comic industry, and researching the techniques of animation. I attended the Otis Summer of Art program at 14 and through highschool attended the Ryman Arts Program on the weekends. At 17 I got to go on a private tour of the Disney Animation house in Anahiem, and around that same time I got accepted to the Otis College of Art and Design. I was driven, I was zealous, I believed whole heartedly by the time I was 20 I would be a famous Comic Artist/Animator. Then all the sudden everything came crashing down.
I was excelling in my Foundation Year (freshman year’s title at Otis), living off campus with a friend from highschool, and working overnight at a Ralph’s in El Segundo. I would work Midnight to 7 a.m. and then go to class from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m. depending on homework load, I would get home between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. I told myself I was hustling. However things between my roommate and I were becoming exhuasting. He was fundamentally a hoarder, and I was making plans to move onto campus in the next year. We’d get into arguments around cleanliness, rent, anything really. We just were no longer friends. I was barely home. I was there to sleep before work and change clothes. I was keeping a lot of my supplies in a different friend’s room on campus, but all of my main stuff and final pieces were in my apartment. Then I got home one day durring the last week of finals. I noticed my roommate wasn’t home. It was my day off the next day, I was ready to rest for a bit and finish up what I could. I get upstairs to the apartment, and it was the dumpster I recognized, but things were missing. I was confused, but thought maybe my roommate had finally started cleaning. I hopscotched accross the mess, and opened the door to my room, and was utterly devastated.
My finals were in pieces on the floor. My PS4 was missing. I tweaked out. I went to his room, burst through the door shouting, and was greeted by an empty room with a pile of trash in the middle. Everything was gone. The computer, the bed frame, the mattress, the piles of clothes, the miscellaneous boxes, all of it. All but the food waste. I started calling him frantically. I was enraged and confused. I made my way downstairs, calling for probably the 8th time. I had rolled myself a blunt in attempt to calm my nerves. Before I could even get into the alley directly next to the apartment, my landlord came outside from his flat downstairs. He asked me when I was going to leave. Apparently my roommate broke the lease. I was shocked.
I had negotiated week to move out. I reached out to the department heads in attempt to find a solution. I was told I needed to withdraw. There was already vocal concern from them and two of my professors around my ability to maintain due to my schedule. They told me withdrawl was the best option. With no finals to turn in, I would fail my first year of college, in my first semester, and would never be able to be readmmitted. If I took the withdrawl, I could come back, but I’d have to start all over. I was gutted. I had no options. I was at the end of my rope. I was embarrassed. I took the withdrawl. Some of my coworkers clocked out with me one morning, and helped me move my stuff out. We cleaned that apartment till our next shift started. By the 5th day of the week I had, I was out. Out of an apartment, out of my dream school, out of that zealous energy I had to succeed. I had nothing left. I didn’t know how to tell my mom. I didn’t tell her or my family what really happened for years. They thought I just dropped out.
I went from believing that I was fully in control of everything in my life to understanding I can only control what I do. It sounds defeatist, but I don’t see it that way. I now know, no matter the effort, no matter the sacrifices, some things just don’t line up to the imaginary world we build for ourselves in our heads. I had to accpet that. It took years of running from that fact. Repeating the cycle, and losing everything again. Until all I had left to lose was that imaginary world. It was freeing to know that I can have a goal, work toward it, while remaining aware that it all could change. I decided the best I could do was stay prepared.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
I came to the realization my pain was a super power a few months after I got out of the psychiatric hospital.
At the end of 2018, I was admitted to Kedren after a mental breakdown. I discovered there something was wrong. I was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, and was being medicated for it. I got out about a month after going in and was asked to live with my grandparents. Safety reasons. I was in a really precarious space mentally. I was still experiencing severe delusions and was very volatile. I remember isolating a lot in an attempt to cope. I remember one day my grandmother asked me to come to the den. When I got into the room, there was an easle set up with acrylic paints. She told me I needed to get back to expressing myself. So I did. Everytime I felt overwhelmed by the voices, or the emotions, I painted. It became a healing ritual for me.
I ended up back in LA about a month or so after. I kept up with that habbit religiously. I set up a pseudo paint studio in the apartment I was staying in. I’d paint before I went to work, when I got home, and until I went to sleep. It was grounding for me. I was able to put all of the feelings and voices somewhere and leave them there. I didn’t think at the time I was hiding it, but I definitely wasn’t sharing it. I remember around mid 2019, a good friend of mine was visiting and told me I needed to do a show on this series. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but his advice really pushed my career as a fine artist forward. Suddenly I was doing shows semi-regularly, then I was selling some of my work. Before that it was extremely hard for me to sell my older work. I didn’t understand that people were resonating with these pieces. I thought they were too hyper specific to my experience to be felt. That borught me this undedrstanding I needed to remain honest about what I was feeling in all of my art forms. It informed the music, the comics, the next set of paintings, everything. It informed everything.
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? Is the public version of you the real you?
I want to believe the public version of me is the real me, however I sometimes worry it’s not.
As a human in this hyperconnected forward facing digital world it’s difficult to remain true to who you really are. We live in a world never seen before. Everyone is a content creator now. At times I can feel myself picking and choosing what I speak on to remain capable of speaking on whatever topic deeper in my art, but then I question is that me being honest or authentic. I’ve had my moments of being completely honest in these social media spaces, while also having my moments of being completely reserved. Or at times, one social media platform will get the whole of how I feel, and another will get crumbs.
In person, I am an open book. If you ask me anything I’ll fully honest about how I feel about the topic, but if you don’t, I don’t feel compelled to share. I wasn’t prompted. I guess I mirror that online, but it’s difficult to maintain a presence. As an artist, especially now, there’s this belief we are always suppose to be visble, always engaging, always posting. I find that exhuasting. To posture like everything is building to some expectation. I try my hardest to be as honest as possible in the online space, but that can be exhuasting as well. It easy to be misinterpreted, it’s easy to come off as boring, or difficult to engage with. These thing do rattle around in my mind, since most of my job is being public, but I work to shake off the thoughts and stay true to me.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: Could you give everything your best, even if no one ever praised you for it?
I know I can. I’ve been giving it my all and my best for years before people started noticing. Now that people are noticing, I can’t switch up.
I’ve put years of practice and effort into everything I do and I am still putting in that same energy. I can’t stop, if I do, I’ll never be able to surpass where I was yesterday. That’s my main focus. Surpassing myself. Outdoing myself. When I recive praise for it, that’s awesome. It let’s me know I’m going in the right direction, but it doesn’t mean that’s all I did it for. I am constantly trying to prove to myself I can become even better in the crafts I work on. I am constantly trying to learn new approaches and techniques for my art. I am a space now where I want myself to grow in every direction as an artist. Praise, accolades, and monetary gain are dope. Financial stability through my art is a goal, but not the finish line. It would simply be a reminder to keep going.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thaconqueror?igsh=MWhxZ2Z2YXU4bGNzbQ==
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@thaconqueror?si=Fk623EcC1kdC9PbY
- Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/hwgYoJcWW58anu2dEQ
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/album/1dlhqhsat7UY8kKK8t6gVt
Image Credits
Image 1 and 2 shot by Micah Loftis
Image 3 shot by Imanni Jackson
All other images shot and edited by KAANG
