© Ka Yan Lai 黎家恩, 2026. All Rights Reserved.
(2021 - Present) An evolving archive of Hong Kong women across generations and the diaspora.
Pearl Dream began after I returned to Hong Kong, following more than a decade living in New York. I want to photograph
and explore the vast landscape of womanhood - through the currents of change, love, and memory.
Ongoing — 2024 →
Self-published photography book and exhibition. Held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum's Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library and the Asian Art Archive in America.
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A sensorial wellness and beauty world rooted in embodiment, ritual, and conscious design.
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Observing the body, spirit, stars, medicine, and earth - field notes and realizations from my journey of self-alchemy.
Documentary work for couples who want something cinematic — real moments, held still.
Her creative expression evolves through the cultivation of the body, consciousness, nature, the seen, and the unseen.
Born in Hong Kong and shaped by 15 years in New York, KA YAN LAI’s practice emerges from a lifelong negotiation between belonging and elsewhere, memory and becoming. Working primarily through vision-making, her practice moves across filmmaking, photography, publishing, and embodied experiences with sound, scent and food, tracing the same undercurrents: human nature, transformation, and the path of becoming.
520 (2018), her self-published photography book, culminated a decade-long intimate search for the meaning of home, while living illegally in America. First presented at the MoMA PS1 Art Book Fair, it is now held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library and the Asian Art Archive in America.
KA YAN’s documentary narrative short film It's The Most Beautiful Before It's Gone (2021) unknowingly continues this conversation of misplacement, weaving mundane time passage against the clash of memory and loss, filmed in 2019 Hong Kong political turmoil when she finally returned home. The film was screened at the Queens Museum, with support from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Come 2020, KA YAN underwent a profound inner shift. Years of immersion in meditation, energetic healing practices, and ancient cosmological studies led her back towards a family lineage rooted in farming, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and food as medicine - crystallizing a deep understanding of consciousness and the body as a living, communicative intelligence.
Inquiries: home@kayan.is
