Review | Olivia Jia: Nocturnes
BANK, Shanghai
Original article by btr, released on December 16, 2025
Olivia Jia's solo exhibition "Nocturnes" at BANK, from the very beginning, invites viewers to step closer. The exhibition hall is square, open, and bright, but most of the works are no larger than a small paperback-you have to walk in, lean down, and look at the paintings as if flipping through a book, only then can you shut out the surrounding brightness and plunge into that night soaked in blues, grays, and purples. It is a silent, inward-looking world.
The things Jia paints come from family, from archives, and some are invented. She paints illustrations from art history books, museum postcards tucked between pages-objects that were originally reproductions, but in her hands become material for reconstructing private memory. Like the structure of memory itself, her images are filled with layering, veiling, juxtaposition, and the uncertainty that seeps through these gaps.
In Night reading (bronze vessel and night sky) (all works mentioned are from 2025), a postcard of a bronze vessel covers an open book, pressing down on a patch of starry sky. Distant space overlays distant time. In Page Unfolded (Tiger Lily), she accentuates the creases in the paper-its materiality-as if this flower native to East Asia has just struggled free from a memory file folded twice over. Ephemera (pear halved, knife with three inlaid stones, photo corner) reads like a contemporary vanitas, revealing the fragility of time and memory through juxtaposition.
Born in Chicago in 1994 to a Chinese immigrant family, Jia takes her exhibition title from Whistler's series of landscape paintings. "Nocturnes" reveals her method of exploring identity: merging memory, imagination, and reality into one, constructing resonant psychological spaces within intimate images. In the exhibition's only self-portrait, Self-Portrait with Mulberry Leaves (2025), the artist partially covers her face with mulberry leaves. Notably, the leaves depicted are not the white mulberry (Morus alba) commonly found and used in Chinese herbalism, but the red mulberry (Morus rubra), more prevalent in North America. It is as though people, like plants, adapt to new environments while retaining traces of their origins-a subtle reflection on how diasporic identity takes root in foreign soil, carrying with it the imprint of where it began. In this sense, all of Olivia Jia's paintings are self-portraits of a kind-like a hall of mirrors, reflecting in her paintings-within-paintings the many facets of her search through historical memory (from family memory to collective memory) and individual identity.
