KAI-LI MA visual artist

Kai-Li Ma (b. Hamburg, Germany) is a German-Chinese multidisciplinary artist based in the woods of Québec. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communications Design and a Master’s in Fashion Business from IFA Paris and Polimoda. Working across painting, sculpture, video and performance, Ma explores the inner world and the ways memory, experience and time leave traces.

​

Her practice develops through bodies of work that build upon one another rather than begin and end as separate chapters. Materials, gestures and ideas carry forward and transform. Layering, erosion, concealment and revelation recur throughout her work and reflect an ongoing interest in how something can change without everything that came before disappearing.

​

Following the death of her father, Ma developed Perfectly Imperfect (2024–2025), a body of work exploring grief and the space between what has been lost and what remains. Across painting, sculpture and video, stitching became part of the work as a visible gesture of repair.

​

Her current series, Inner Strata, turns toward the inner world as a continually changing terrain. Built through successive layers of paint, dye, pigment, ink and other materials, the paintings accumulate traces of different moments and states. Branching forms and shifting fields move between landscape and organism, earth and cosmos, and explore transformation not as erasure but as accumulation.