About
April Kam enjoys solitude because it forces her to realise how connected she is with the rest of the world. The inner battle with this contradiction sneaks into her practice.
Her work is done by her through others, began in Hong Kong, now in Munich. Secret Life of Mailbox (2009–2011) relies on the postal system and the receivers; Alien Nation (2021) requires the soundtrack exchange; Tracing… (2018, 2022–now) is made possible by the family inside the living room; Arbuscule (2026) could not exist without her breath and gravity.
The materials sit on her shelves and ask to be transformed: the fashion magazine and fabric, the action camera and the walks, the sound and the bubbles. Nothing has been sourced for a project. Nothing is drafted either. The pattern she doodled on a biology textbook at 18 comes back to her, begging the mother to reconnect with her younger self.
And motherhood is the peak of the contradiction.
She draws the lines… a trace of thought, no trace of rest.
She draws the line… claiming brief moments of tranquillity, away from chores and schedules.
She traces ancestry… her mother, and the mother of her mother, and the mother of her grandmother.
She learns to love by tracing her sons’ laughter and tears.
She finds traces of hope.
April Kam (b. 1986, Hong Kong) lives and works in Munich. She holds a BA from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, awarded First Class Honours in 2008, and studied on a Chung Hwa Travel Service Scholarship. She also completed a summer programme in fashion design at Polimoda, Florence.
From 2009 to 2011 she ran Secret Life of Mailbox, a mail art correspondence exchanged with recipients in more than thirty countries, working with fabric, fashion magazine pages, Chinese almanac calendars and red packets in formats that refused the standardised dimensions of conventional envelopes and postcards.
In 2021 she contributed to Alien Nation, a collaborative sound work made between Hong Kong and Munich, shown at achtzehnkommazwei within Back Coupling, a programme of simultaneous group exhibitions across the city. Since 2022 she has been working on the ongoing drawing series Tracing…
Before moving to Germany she worked as a behavioural therapist with autistic children, in administration at a mosque in Hong Kong, and as a teacher of English and creative writing. She continues to work as a translator and editor.