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 that investigate transformation, memory, and the hidden structures that shape interior life.

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Her practice unfolds in transitional phases that gradually dissolve into one another. Rather than fixed departures, each body of work carries remnants of the last while introducing new material and emotional languages. Thread, raw texture, erosion, and layered surfaces recur throughout her practice, functioning less as materials than as acts of excavation. Her works often resemble fragments unearthed rather than composed, holding tensions between destruction and repair, concealment and revelation.

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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.

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Her current series Inner Strata considers painting as a site of layered interior structure, where memory, experience, and time settle into one another through repeated acts of making. Rather than resolving into image or narrative, the works remain in states of transition, where matter becomes memory, collapse becomes structure, and presence turns into residue.

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The series approaches transformation as an ongoing internal reorganization, where tension, erosion, and regeneration coexist within the same surface. It treats painting less as representation than as accumulation, where what is lived is gradually embedded into material form.