In Panama they call him el chino, and Shyno wears it like a crown. The rapper of Chinese descent has spent the best part of a decade as one of the hardest voices in Panamanian Latin trap, and his newest video, “Barbie Coca”, has passed 620,000 views since February. It sits on top of a catalogue most artists would trade anything for: “Padre Nuestro” at more than 7.6 million views, “Japonés” past 3 million, and “ZAZA” and “Tusiketa” each beyond 2 million. Remezcla put him on its list of Panamanian urbano artists the world needs to know, with a co-sign from Nicky Jam himself.
Roots in Canton, streets of Panama
Shyno’s family roots go back to Canton in southern China, and his story is part of one of the oldest Chinese communities in the Americas: Chinese Panamanians have been part of the country since the railroad and canal years. Booking agency MN2S sums him up as “a rap artist of Chinese descent hailing from Panama”, and Remezcla calls him “the Asian-Panamanian rapper”. He came up in the same scene as Japanese, the Panamanian star whose name is also a nod to Asia, and Shyno has never forgotten it. When Japanese fell ill in 2022, Shyno wrote that if it were not for “Japa”, he might be doing something other than singing.
The run
The breakthrough came with “Japonés” in 2017, the year of his debut album Never Legal, and “Padre Nuestro” in January 2019 made him a name across the Spanish-speaking internet. Since then the hits have kept coming: “ZAZA” (2022), “XOXO (Piso 33)” and “McDonalds” (2023), “NASA”, “Gelato” and the Héctor Lavoe Freestyle “HLF” (2024), then “Tusiketa” and “Cali Kush” (2025). “Barbie Coca” is the 2026 chapter, and the trap still hits as hard as the first day. Press play: this is Panama’s Latin trap with a Cantonese heartbeat.
