Olivia Jia describes her nocturne, blue-cast paintings of books, objects, and the night as psychological self-portraits. Jia’s paintings unearth the depths of her psyche and become a narrative experience through the act of painting. Her work avoids the mimicry of reality to instead submit reality to the interior depths of her mind—excavating memories, experiences, and histories in the process. The nocturnal setting alludes to the heightened activity of the mind at night, or what she described to me as ‘what happens when we are alone with ourselves.’ While dark in aesthetic, the color palette and process emerge as a form of continual self-discovery for Jia, as opposed to a pre-mediated action inspired by a specific genre or mood. In fact, the artist purposefully draws inspiration from multiple genres of paintings across Western and Eastern art histories, including Still Life, Realism, and Huaniaohua (the Chinese tradition of Bird and Flower painting). 

Although the artist is rarely directly pictured in the paintings via physical likeness, the work instead captures her through her essence and  through the objects that populate the paintings, such as books. In these fictional workspaces, the desks are cluttered with archival documents, family heirlooms, and objects that become a metaphor for the mind. These objects are culled from Jia’s personal archive, which includes cell phone images, museum displays, and memories. The fragmentation of the narrative is critical to Jia’s practice as it becomes a metaphor for cultural heritage and a way to navigate her family history as immigrants from China. 

In Jia’s work, the mind is a reflection of the instability of identity and culture, allowing her to question whether these markers are stable, fixed parameters by which the self is configured. Instead, they are always changing and being mixed and molded with parts of past lives and the selves yet to emerge.