1. Pandora’s Box
2. Iam
3. Field of Dreams
4. The Return of the Little Prince
5. No. 7
6. Just Do It
7. Timespace
About the Artist
An idiosyncratic specimen of globalization, Katya Kan was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, her father being North Korean and her mother being Russian. Having caught a glimpse of the ex-USSR, she has a nostalgic, conflicting perception of political and cultural systems. The image of Korea evokes for her a tantalizing, fragile and beautifully moving atmosphere. How come? Perhaps, because her father, who was born Pyongyang, writes essays and existential about the Korean diaspora in former CIS countries. Devoid of a homeland, she focuses her art on the themes of ethnical atomization, emptiness and nostalgia. Unable to fully assimilate into any one culture, she finds herself as an outsider with an eclectic artistic taste. Art represents the act of seeking, assembling and immortalizing beauty. Through her artistic practice, she recreates the state of inspiration and emancipation, experienced during her childhood. Her works strive to capture the ephemeral impressions. The concepts, which she explores in her work, include the globalization, surveillance, nostalgia, utopia and eroticism. Recently, she was involved in initiatives with the Royal Watercolor Society, Art Below, Art Wars in London, Red Dot Miami and Los Angeles. This year, she is having shows at 508 Kings Road in London as well as Untitled Space, the New York Art Expo, Theresa Byrnes Gallery and Salon Anise in New York.
At this moment of self-isolation, she is exploring the notion of the performative nature of our identities as well as the semiotics of language. She is taking inspiration from the theories of Feminist essayist, Judith Butler and linguistic theorist, Ferdinand de Saussure. She is doing videos of herself every day, enacting different personas and deconstructing her own thoughts. In this way, she is using her performance/video art as a vehicle for self-enlightenment. She does euphoric dance, whereby she learns new hip hop/street routines on YouTube every month in order to let lose her creative slow and mute the voice of self-judgment. She would like the world to enter a greater sense of connectivity after the Covid-19 outbreak is over through enacting more charitable events for the community and also to learn a lesson from this self-isolation in terms of protecting the planet: traveling only when necessary and making only the most necessary movements. In terms of her own contribution to the community, she attended a lot of private views before the outbreak and she has now started doing self-therapy videos on social media to help herself and others around her feel better during self-isolation. She calls this technique “Social Media Mirroring Technique” or SMMT – using Facebook and/or Instagram live/story options as a medium for exploring the self and to dismantle the years of cultural conditioning that we are all victims of. In her spare time, she loves watching independent movies and animations by international artists, including Miyazaki, Tarkovsky and Wong Kar-wai and being a video artist, she attend a number of film festivals, ranging from Cannes to AFI. Outside of her art, she is deeply inspired by studying people: what makes them tick, react a certain way as well as how their body language reflects their inner state of being. She is currently engulfed in exploring RTT (Rapid Transformational Therapy), developed by world renowned psychologist Marisa Peers. Peers encourages all of us to dissect our low self-esteem issues by enacting hypnotherapy and doing the “ladder technique”, where we descend into our subconsciousness and unravel childhood memories, which gave me certain negative judgements of ourselves, i.e. “I am not intelligent enough”, “I am not worthy of love”, “I am not enough,” and so on. She has started implementing this technique on her own to unleash her art practice with noticeable results already. To view more of her work click below.
