KAI-LI MA visual artist
Kai-Li Ma (b. Hamburg, Germany) is a German-Chinese multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal. 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 creates tactile mixed-media works exploring transformation, memory, and the hidden structures of interior life.
Her practice unfolds in transitional phases that dissolve into one another. Rather than fixed departures, each body of work carries traces of the last while introducing new material and conceptual directions. Thread, raw texture, erosion, and layered surfaces recur throughout her work, functioning less as materials than as acts of excavation. Her works often read as fragments unearthed rather than composed, holding tensions between destruction and repair, concealment and revelation.
Following the death of her father, Ma developed Perfectly Imperfect, a body of work centered on grief, concealment, and the unstable architecture of identity after loss. These earlier works explored rupture and reconstruction through gestures of stitching, binding, and fragmentation.
Her current series Inner Strata is a series of paintings that treats the surface as a living organism shaped through layered internal structures, where memory, experience, and time accumulate through repeated acts of making. Created on unstretched canvas laid on the floor and continuously rotated, the works develop through cycles of response, with material constantly reoriented and re-read.
Across the series, painting becomes a site of ongoing internal reorganization. Tension, erosion and regeneration coexist within the same field producing branching structures and shifting terrains that behave like connective systems; part landscape, part organism, part map.
Rather than resolving into image or narrative, the works remain in states of becoming, where what is lived is gradually embedded into material form and held as trace, residue and structure.
