About
Kai is a UK-based photographer working primarily in digital portraiture. His work explores intimacy, identity, and light through a queer lens. He often focuses on the space between tension and tenderness: a glance held too long, a body half in shadow, the quiet vulnerability of stillness.
As a neurodivergent artist, Kai has long been drawn to the overstimulating nature of light. Its harshness, contrast, and emotional charge are at once overwhelming and profound. Through photography, he finds a way to hold that intensity, capturing moments that exist only briefly, then remain indefinitely. His work is rooted in presence, raw emotion, and the quiet, sometimes erotic, intimacy of being observed.
His connection to photography is both deeply personal and technically curious. As someone with aphantasia, he cannot visualise memories or images in his mind. Creating photographs allows him to preserve and revisit experiences that would otherwise vanish. Each image becomes a tactile record of feeling, space, and atmosphere — a way to remember what cannot be pictured internally.
Kai draws influence from artists who challenge and expand the queer gaze. Fergus Greer’s portraits of Leigh Bowery, with their collision of performance and exposure, left a lasting impact. Adrian Lourie’s Meat zine offers an unfiltered, grounded masculinity. Robert Mapplethorpe’s formal control and monochrome precision continue to shape Kai’s sense of visual tension. He is also drawn to the contemporary work of Alejo Dillor, Liu Tao, and Lin Jiahang, whose practices explore the body through intimacy, restraint, and emotional tone. Lucas Ulmer’s SPARK project, with its tactile use of colour and polished physicality, offers a quieter visual parallel — a study in queer presentation that lingers in surface, light, and control.
Kai is a co-founder of Pup and Tiger, a queer art space committed to platforming underrepresented voices in contemporary art. The space serves as a site for experimentation, connection, and visibility. Its upcoming series, Soft Territories, focuses on artists whose work exists between forms, identities, or disciplines — a curatorial vision that mirrors Kai’s own interest in emotional texture and the architecture of in-between spaces.
This archive is home to his ongoing photographic series, including Between, a study in scale, queer stillness, and the quiet architecture of being seen. Each collection invites different emotional responses, shaped by the space it occupies and the questions it asks. Between holds weight, silence, and proportion. Future work may feel softer, sharper, more playful, or more exposed, but all remain rooted in the act of witnessing.