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Kristin Man

Kristin Man is a Hong Kong-born interdisciplinary artist and author based in Vancouver. Her practice encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, writing, video, and performance.

Man holds an IB from the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, a BA in International Relations from Brown University, and an MBA from Columbia University. She is also a Yoga Alliance-recognised 500-hour certified yoga teacher. Her artistic practice includes Fragments of Grey Matter, 9_9, and the ongoing A-MARE (to love–to sea). Since 2018, her work has increasingly moved from photography towards three-dimensional and material practices, incorporating woven photographic images, found plastics, and industrial remnants.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Museo MADRE, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Flowers Gallery London, Luisa Catucci Gallery Berlin, and Gallery 881 Vancouver.
Man lives and works in Vancouver.

Kristin Man

Kristin Man is a Hong Kong-born interdisciplinary artist and author based in Vancouver. Her practice encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, writing, video, and performance.

Man holds an IB from the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, a BA in International Relations from Brown University, and an MBA from Columbia University. She is also a Yoga Alliance-recognised 500-hour certified yoga teacher. Her artistic practice includes Fragments of Grey Matter, 9_9, and the ongoing A-MARE (to love–to sea). Since 2018, her work has increasingly moved from photography towards three-dimensional and material practices, incorporating woven photographic images, found plastics, and industrial remnants.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Museo MADRE, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Flowers Gallery London, Luisa Catucci Gallery Berlin, and Gallery 881 Vancouver.
Man lives and works in Vancouver.

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Kristin Man’s practice explores the relationship between personal experience and wider social and environmental conditions. Photography, writing, sculpture, installation, and moving image become different ways of examining memory, displacement, consumption, and human connection. Her process often begins with the photographic image, which is subsequently fragmented, woven, layered, or transformed into an object. In her ongoing project A-MARE, found plastics and industrial remnants enter this process, bringing the physical traces of consumption into dialogue with photography and poetic form. The title A-MARE plays on the Italian words amare, “to love”, and mare, “sea”. The sea becomes a space of connection and movement, while also carrying associations of migration, instability, and environmental consequence. Undercurrents, developed from this project, focuses on what remains beneath the visible surface: the forces and histories that shape individual and collective experience. Language is integral to Man’s practice. Moving between English, Chinese, and Italian, she uses text and image as complementary forms of visual poetry. Her works often leave connections unresolved, allowing fragments and material relationships to generate multiple readings. Her practice ultimately examines the tension between the intimate and the collective, asking how individual lives are shaped by the environments, systems, and cultures they inhabit.

                                                                                            

ARTISTIC RESIDENCIES & PARTICIPATIONS

Man’s international residencies include Luisa Catucci Art Gallery, Berlin (2024), Château Orquevaux, France, as a Didierot Grant recipient (2022), PINEA, Andalusia (2018), Ginestrelle, Assisi (2015), CeRCCa, Catalunya (2014), and La Macina di San Cresci, Tuscany (2014). Her photographic training includes workshops with Magnum photographers Patrick Zachmann and Nikos Economopoulos, as well as a National Geographic Photography Workshop with Nevada Wier. In 2014, she assisted Patrick Zachmann on his Hong Kong project.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Her solo exhibitions include Undercurrents at Gallery 881, Vancouver (2024); A-MARE at Luisa Catucci Gallery, Berlin (2024); A-MARE at Canton-Sardine Gallery, Vancouver (2021) and Andrea Nuovo Home Gallery, Italy (2019–2020); 9_9 at Tyrvee Art Gallery, Greece (2020), PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli (2018), and Magazzini Fotografici, Naples (2017); and Fragments of Grey Matter at Asia One, Hong Kong (2014), with further presentations of Fragments in New York and Singapore.

Selected group exhibitions include Mercy Mercy (Me) at Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver (2022); Small is Beautiful and Her Ground at Flowers Gallery, London (2021–2019); Changing Horizons at Deer Lake Gallery, Vancouver (2021); Written on Water at Benjamin Lumb Art House, Vancouver (2020); the Global Solidarity Project by TransCultural Exchange (2020); and A-MARE at PINEA Artist Residency, Spain (2018).

In 2021, Man created Misty for A-MARE, featuring her original Cantonese lyrics and a cappella singing, which received the OTB Best Mobile Film Award.

She also created There’s Something About This Place in collaboration with writer and poet Juliane Okot Bitek, developed during Bitek’s residency at Burnaby Arts Council’s Deer Lake.

Man is the author of two artist publications: Fragments of Grey Matter (Singapore, 2013) explores memory and perception through photography and text and received a Tokyo Type Directors’ Club Award of Excellence in 2014.

9_9, published by Skira in 2017, develops her relationship between photography, language, sequence, and visual poetry. The project was presented extensively across Italy, including at PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Museo MADRE, Fondazione Casa Morra, Archivio dello Stato Roma, and Rizzoli Milano.

SEMINARS & INSTITUTIONAL PRESENTATIONS

Man has presented her research at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia with A-MARE (2021) and at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver, with Is Identity Relational? (2021).

Her work has also been presented in institutional and cultural contexts including Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Italian National Archives in Rome, Rizzoli Milano, PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, and Museo MADRE.

EDUCATION & TRAINING

United World College of the Atlantic, Wales
International Baccalaureate

Brown University, USA
BA, International Relations

Columbia University, USA
MBA

Central Saint Martins, London
Photography courses, 2009–2011

Yoga Alliance
500-Hour Certified Yoga Teacher Training, 2018–2023

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