C hayan Khoi was born in 1963, in Teheran, where he was raised by his father, a writer, and his mother who was a teacher. He remained there until 1979, when he left his native Iran to study in Grenoble, France. He was sixteen at the time. He was out to succeed and would do everything it took to achieve it.

The artist is a born self-educator, a hands-on person, who, from photography to digital production, from photo-journalism to reporting, has learned everything on his own. In the nineteen eighties, he went into photography to pay for his architectural studies and very quickly developed a passion for the photographic medium. He then decided to come to Paris to further his university education in a design school, while continuing as fashion photographer.

A few years later, he became involved in reporting and executed numerous commissions for the specialized press, commissions through which he would hone his photographic techniques and forge and identity. Little by little, the amateur turned professional and, on the strength of his journalistic skills, would definitely abandon architecture and design to devote himself to works of a more personal nature. So began his career without borders as a photographer.

C HAYAN undertook the daunting task of preserving a memory for future generations by immortalizing, through imagery, everything that is wonderful on our blue planet: masterpieces which he feels are more than ever threatened by men, by war, by natural catastrophes, ecological cataclysms and hordes of devastating tourists. He would make numerous solitary expeditions and became photographically involved in the fight against all of the ills that are deteriorating this Earth which must be preserved and which he condemns without pity. During his wanderings, this inveterate globetrotter accumulated thousands of negatives within just a few years, before projecting himself into other fields of experimentation, this time influenced by the electronic revolution. As a precursor, the reporter showed interest in avant-garde technologies, rich in potential, with much to offer the artistic world – particularly in terms of image processing.
He would immediately grasp this new virtual realty, which was soon to transform the entire photographic world, and he hastily put himself to the task of digital production. After sorting, and then digitizing the entire silver image bank he had just constituted onto a gigantic computerized database, CHAYAN KHOI would begin his first electronic sketches – which he qualifies as Cyber-realistic. He now had the term, and was able to make Cyber-realism his medium.