Since graduating from Elam in 1998 Buchanan (Te Atiawa, Taranaki and Pakeha) has exhibited regularly around New Zealand. This has included contributing to a number of group and solo exhibitions. These solo shows have included “Sleeping” at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2009 and “Forever” at the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt in 2012.
Buchanan's obsession with abstraction, pattern making, music and popular culture has seen him develop a highly idiosyncratic style and way of making art. The City Art Collection includes a work titled Snow Leopard which exemplifies Buchanan’s psychedelic optical cut vinyl aesthetic.

Buchanan began study toward a Masters degree from Massey University in 2020, where his visual style is shown to have changed dramatically. His flat matte paintings depict seemingly random forms and illustrated images, eliciting the viewer to conjure their own meaning to the work. Much smaller and softer in scale, his humour comes through in flashes of recognition of culture references and in-jokes. Buchanan makes these small paintings in groups to respond to each other. Conceptually his work questions what comes after abstraction and ponders a future reality in which the idea of being ‘abstracted’ from a body is taken to the extreme. In 2021 Buchanan returned to creating public art work at a large scale when he was commissioned to produce a mural with the theme ‘Year of the Rat’, contributing to the Chinese New Year Zodiac Art Trail in Wellington.