Koi

Born and raised in Queens, NYC, AW177 is a Chinese-American self-taught artist/designer with a bright and vivid style influenced by Chinese culture, Asian motifs, graffiti and technical illustration. He takes these concepts and mixes them together to create a colorful and festive, yet powerful and emotional feel to his work, whether in printed or graphical form to customized vinyl art toys. The artist name AW177 is an amalgamation of initials of his real name along w/ numerals that hold a special meaning to him. The same can be said with his artwork – an amalgamation of different mediums, subjects and ideas that work together to form pieces of unique art that have special and powerful meanings. Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.