Olzhas Issan (b. 1981, Karaganda, Kazakhstan) is a contemporary artist whose painting practice explores the relationships between memory, landscape, perception, and ecological vulnerability.
He studied Design at the Kazakh Leading Academy of Architecture and Civil Engineering (KazGASA), graduating in 2004. After more than two decades working as an entrepreneur across Central Asia, Issan returned to painting in 2025 following a twenty-five-year absence from artistic practice.
Working between expressive figuration and gestural abstraction, he investigates how living forms can carry traces of cultural memory,
environmental change, and human experience. His ongoing series,
Vanishing Archetypes, focuses on endangered animals as symbolic
presences situated between visibility and disappearance.
In 2026, his work was selected for the Summer Group International
Exhibition at No.35 Gallery in the United Kingdom, which brought
together artists from 34 countries. His paintings are held in private and
corporate collections internationally, including the collection of Standard
Chartered Bank in Frankfurt.
Issan currently lives and works between Southeast Asia and India.
