Under the Light of Marama: Simon Kaan at Aotearoa Art Fair 2026
Image credit: Simon Kaan, Marama Series IV, 2026, ink and oil on board, 1250 (w) x 950 (h) mm. Courtesy of SANDERSON.
At this year’s Aotearoa Art Fair, audiences will encounter a new body of work by Simon Kaan at SANDERSON that emerges from grief, reflection, and renewal. Created in the wake of a close friend’s passing, Kaan’s recent Marama paintings consider light and darkness not as opposites, but as forces that exist in constant relation. The result is a series shaped by intimacy and spiritual presence, offering a moment of stillness within the energy of the fair.
Kaan is one of Aotearoa’s most respected painters and printmakers, with a practice spanning decades and grounded in a deeply considered visual language. Of Ngāi Tahu, Chinese and Pākehā heritage, he has long explored the layered realities of identity. His works often move between the personal and the universal, holding space for questions of ancestry while resisting simple resolution.
That complexity feels especially resonant now, as Kaan is set to have a work acquired for the permanent collection of Auckland Art Gallery. The acquisition marks an important institutional recognition of an artist whose contribution to contemporary art in Aotearoa has been steady, rigorous and quietly influential.
Yet rather than looking backwards, the Marama series speaks to an artist continuing to evolve.
The title refers to the Māori concept of Marama, often associated with the moon, illumination and cycles of time. In many Māori frameworks, the moon is not a distant object but an active presence, guiding rhythms of life, environment and spirit. Kaan draws on this understanding to create works that feel less like representations and more like meditations.
These paintings were produced in an intense burst of activity in the artist’s studio, shaped by the emotional immediacy of loss. There is a sense, when considering the series, that painting became both ritual and response. Grief can fracture language, but image-making offers another path. Kaan’s canvases hold that tension between sorrow and solace, between absence and continuation.
What distinguishes his practice is his ability to communicate profound ideas without overstatement. Rather than relying on spectacle, Kaan works through restraint, composition and accumulated meaning. Across the Marama works, viewers may find themselves slowing down, adjusting to quieter registers of attention.
Image credit: Simon Kann working in the studio. Courtesy of SANDERSON.
This relationship to space has long been central to Kaan’s practice. Whether physical, psychological or metaphysical, space in his work is rarely empty. It is charged with memory, lineage and possibility. In the new paintings, these concerns gather around mourning and transformation, suggesting that loss can also sharpen one’s awareness of connection.
Kaan’s career has consistently bridged cultures and contexts. He was the inaugural recipient of the Asia: New Zealand/Creative New Zealand artist residency at Beijing’s Red Gate Gallery, an experience that expanded his engagement with cross-cultural dialogue. He has also collaborated with acclaimed ceramic artist Wi Taepa ONZM, and was recently featured in Radio New Zealand’s Fine Arts from Asia: Art Stories in Aotearoa, alongside Yona Lee and Yuki Kihara. These moments reflect the breadth of his practice, but also his place within wider conversations around identity and contemporary art in the region.
Even so, Kaan’s work retains a deeply personal core. He does not treat heritage as a static subject matter or identity as a fixed category. Instead, he approaches both as lived and evolving realities. The intermingling of Ngāi Tahu, Chinese and Pākehā whakapapa becomes a site of inquiry, generating symbols and visual languages that remain open rather than prescribed.
Image credit: Simon Kaan, Marama Series III, 2025, ink and oil on board, 1250 (w) x 950 (h) mm. Courtesy of SANDERSON.
At an art fair, where attention is often pulled in multiple directions, such openness can be powerful. The Marama paintings ask for something different from the viewer, not speed, but presence, not immediate answers, but reflection. They offer a pause within the fair’s momentum and remind us that art can hold emotional states that words cannot easily contain.
There is also something fitting in presenting this series publicly at a moment of institutional acknowledgement. As Auckland Art Gallery prepares to welcome Kaan’s work into its permanent collection, these new paintings demonstrate that recognition need not signal arrival in a final sense. Instead, it can illuminate the ongoing nature of practice itself, the continual return to questions that matter, the willingness to begin again, the courage to make work through life’s most difficult passages.
Aotearoa Art Fair 2026 runs April 30 to May 3 at Viaduct Events Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Simon Kaan’s work is being shown by SANDERSON.
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