In this paper, a new non-linear process monitoring method based on kernel independent component analysis (KICA) is developed. Its basic idea is to use KICA to extract some dominant independent components capturing non-linearity from normal operating process data and to combine them with statistical process monitoring techniques. The proposed method is applied to the fault detection in the Tennessee Eastman process and is compared with PCA, modified ICA, and KPCA. The proposed approach effectively captures the non-linear relationship in the process variables and showed superior fault detectability compared to other methods while attaining comparable false alarm rates.