Kay Lai

Kay Lai is a Hong Kong–based portrait photographer and founder of Kay Lai Studio. She studied fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York before returning to Hong Kong, where she has spent the past nine years developing her studio practice. Her work has been featured in Vogue Hong Kong, Hashtag Legend, and The Lane.

Lai’s practice centres on individual, maternity, and family portraiture, bringing a fashion-editorial sensibility to the intimacy of each sitting. Her concern extends beyond how people feel in front of the camera to how they perceive themselves afterwards. An ongoing interest in the relationship between self-perception and confidence informs her approach, with the hope that those she photographs may leave with a gentler understanding of themselves.

For Still, We Continue, Lai collaborates with Canvas of The Heart on the project’s visual direction and black-and-white portrait series. Bringing together sixteen participants at different stages of life, the project places each portrait alongside a recorded conversation centred on the same question: “At this stage of your life, what is your biggest struggle?” This shared question draws attention to the distance between outward appearance and lived experience, while allowing each struggle to be understood within the stage of life in which it is encountered. Unfolding across three chapters, the project listens first to women and then to men before bringing all sixteen participants together to consider what becomes visible when experiences initially heard apart are placed alongside one another. Within this structure, listening becomes a form of care—an invitation to withhold judgement and recognise that no single difficulty can encompass the whole of a life.