b. 1994, United States
Painted with what she describes as a “nocturnal” palette, Olivia Jia (b. 1994, Chicago, IL) creates works with a somnambulant quality, appearing as if scenes encountered in a state between sleep and waking. Frequently depicting imagined books and ephemera, each painting is constructed around a tableau that the artist has arranged, incorporating material collected by herself or held by family members, alongside references to American and Chinese art histories. Informed by Jia’s own diasporic identity as the child of Chinese immigrants to the United States, ideas of kinship, heritage, longing, and belonging are negotiated through the constellations of elements she gathers in her compositions. Staged in a studio workspace, depicted either late at night or in an imagined facsimile of that location, her paintings serve as tools with which a greater degree of self-recognition might be arrived at. The somberly lit surfaces upon which these objects and images appear function at once as tabletops or pinboards on which things might be placed, and as psychic spaces onto which desire might be projected.