Ka Yan is a Hong Kong born and Naarm based artist. Her drawing and installation practice investigates how emotion, kinship, identity are shaped by social and cultural norms, and deconstructs the post-colonisation impacts on patterns of intergenerational migration. 

Her work positions autoethnographic and psychoanalytical installation as a critical research method, expanding contemporary understandings of displacement. Drawing from her family’s multi-generational migration histories within Hong Kong’s post-colonial context, she reflects on inherited psychological ties and disrupted family structures shaped by politics and tradition. Her practice acts as a living archive—preserving, deconstructing, and reframing unspoken cultural loss—while prompting audiences to consider how social and cultural formations shape subjectivity.

Through material, visual, and spatial languages, she reinterprets disrupted lives from an after-care perspective, foregrounding empathy as a collective mode of reflection. Proposing care and emotion as forms of resistance and resilience, her work releases silenced stories constrained by cultural norms and expands East Asian feminist discourse. Ultimately, her practice gives voice to individuals navigating displacement, familial rupture, and socio-cultural confinement.

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Image credit: Maki Levine