Kayee C is a fine art photographer born and raised in Hong Kong, currently living in France. She creates works by assembling her self-portraits to explore human relationships, particularly the tension between our desire for fusion, social acceptance, and our need for individual realisation. Her practice offers a critical, offbeat, and sometimes poetic perspective on the way we relate to each other.
Characters staged in her portraits range from complete strangers and coworkers to family members and even figures resembling deities. They struggle to balance societal expectations with their desire to be themselves. Out of phase with the pursuit of an appearance of cohesion, they seem to be constantly negotiating who they are supposed to be, while being unable to leave the scene.
In this exhibition, each character appears mid-scene, suspended in a moment they did not choose and cannot leave. The promise of “one last take and we can all go home” implies collective compliance and fleeting reward, yet quietly erases individual agency. All characters are performed by the artist and assembled into a single frame, collapsing distinctions between director and actor, enforcer and subject, witness and accomplice. There is no specific place or event depicted, only a condition: the normalised pressure to stay, to finish, to endure just a little longer.