Philipp Hesser

NININ insists on paradox. Like a Zen riddle, it resists resolution: neither is, nor is not. The canvases, saturated to the point of opacity, become both surface and abyss. Their darkness recalls the censored page, where black bars erase meaning while simultaneously declaring its presence. What is hidden becomes visible through its concealment; what is shown dissolves into insignificance through repetition and excess.

In this way, NININ speaks the language of our time: a world of overproduction and arbitrariness, where every image is immediately consumed by the next, where social media feeds and markets hunger without end. Yet the paintings do not merely condemn—they hold open the tension between fullness and emptiness, between spirit and nihilism, between art and its negation. They remind us that paradox is not a failure of meaning but its most radical form: a place where seeing becomes unseeing, where the black surface is at once censorship and liberation.

Update 2025: With NININ #23 the artist returns to painting exclusively the NININ-series of paintings.
(the Neither Is Nor Is Not- series of paintings was started in 2019. It is a spiritual-artistic or philosophical concept to point to the unity of all being. It criticizes the...

2022: TEFL certified (Teaching English as a Foreign Language)

2019: Learning sailing from the Wind and the Water aboard sailing boat "Runa" on the Atlantic coast; France

2013 - 2015: Studied painting and art history with Kathmandu, Nepal based french artist Vincent Gréby in Battambang, Cambodia.

2011: MA Social- Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna/Austria (museum studies, Southeast Asia)
1997: started painting after graduation from high school - autodidact

Battambang International Digital Arts Featival 2016

Corpus. Group Exhibition at the Sangker Gallery, Battambang, Cambodia. October 2015

The Battambang Monochron. Large Scale Painting Group Project at Sammaki Art Space, Battambang, Cambodia. December 2014 - June 2015

20$, I love you too much! Vincent Gréby and Philipp Hesser at Make Maek Art Space, Battambang, Cambodia. July - August 2014