Olivia Jia: Nocturnes

The exhibition Nocturnes takes its title from James McNeill Whistler’s series of landscape paintings that borrowed the musical term for works evoking the stillness and introspection of the night. Whistler reinterprets the nocturne as both a visual and psychological space — a realm where memory, imagination, and reality quietly converge.

In Nocturnes, Olivia Jia explores the act of remembering through the quiet and introspective space of the night. Born in the United States to a Chinese family, Jia’s work is deeply informed by the condition of cultural in-betweenness — a negotiation between inherited memory and lived experience. Across this body of work, she returns to a restrained, nocturnal palette of blues, greys, and purples — tones that evoke the atmosphere of moonlight, lamplight, and the subtle gradations between wakefulness and dream. Within these dimly illuminated scenes, Jia constructs images that hover between the real and the imagined, offering moments of stillness in which memory and invention converge.

Each painting takes form through a process of reconstruction. Objects — whether familial, archival, or entirely invented — become vessels of association, standing in for histories that are intimate yet uncertain. Many of these compositions are framed as open books, documents, or printed pages; they function as repositories where fragments of visual memory are gathered and reordered. By translating reference images into painted form, the artist lends materiality and historical weight to things that might otherwise remain intangible — to recollections that are poetic, unstable, or only half-remembered.

In Nocturnes, the book and the document serve not as sources of authority, but as imaginative frameworks through which meaning is negotiated. The artist’s engagement with textual and visual archives is not about verification, but about creating a space where truth and reverie coexist. The nocturnal setting thus becomes both literal and psychological: a metaphor for reflection, solitude, and the quiet work of reassembling the self through time.

Through this synthesis of memory and invention, Jia invites viewers into an intimate terrain — one that mirrors the interior rhythm of thought itself. Like the hours after nightfall, when the boundaries between fact and imagination blur, Nocturnes proposes that the act of remembering is never fixed, but always unfolding, like the slow fading of light across a page.

About the Artist

Olivia Jia (b. 1994, Chicago, IL) is a Philadelphia-based artist. She received a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2017. Honors include the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2015 and the President’s Award at the University of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Nine Motifs, Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2023). Perimeter at Margot Samel, New York, NY (2023) and Ex Libris at Workplace, London, UK (2022).

Her works are held in public collections including the Brooklyn Museum (NY, USA), MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK), Penn Medicine: University of Pennsylvania (PA, USA), Palm Springs Art Museum (CA, USA), Huamao Museum (Suzhou, China), The Bunker (West Palm Beach, USA), and Zuzeum Art Center (Riga, Latvia).