Sonia Jia

Memories Woven Into Flesh

Throughout her practice, Jia has explored the notion of precarious intimacy—as something inherently vulnerable when tested by adversity. Yet, it is this vulnerability, often shaped by trauma or sorrow, that can forge deep, unexpected connections between individuals. Jia believes that shared sorrow, personal memory, and the emotional resonance of old objects can collectively soften, even dissolve, the boundaries that separate us. In their wounded figuration and poetic corporeality, Jia’s works become both carriers of silent traumas, connecting personal with the collective.

Curated by Elisa Carollo

June 3rd - July 5th, 2025

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

In her New York debut, Hangzhou-based artist Sonia Jia stages rituals of care and intimacy through a poetic choreography of evocative moments, which both expose and resist the deepening sense of dissociation and alienation felt by an entire generation on a global scale.

Departing from a primarily autobiographical approach rooted in personal and familial narratives, this new body of work marks a shift as Jia opens up questions around broader global generational phenomena—realities not confined to a fast growing China, but tragically shared by Millennials worldwide. A generation hyper-connected yet profoundly dissociated and alienated, suspended in what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls a “burnout society,” where constant self-optimization, performance pressure, and digital overstimulation disrupted the conditions for genuine connection, as all the bounds with traditional social infrastructure - from family and friendship to society and nation - have already been eroded.

Echoing Sartre, for Jia, personal pain and trauma become not just wounds to endure, but portals—ways of transcending the immediacy of suffering and transforming it into a capacity for empathetic perception. Through this, she cultivates a keen empathy to the fragile emotional choreography of her friends, who often oscillate between anxiety, depression, and fleeting euphorias. In the masquerade of joy, they often conceal their unease—an unease that erupts in moments of existential fragility, where the weight of being becomes unbearable, and the temptation to withdraw from life altogether hovers at the edges.

Studies indicate that between 12 and 18 percent of college students are currently being treated for psychological disorders, while adolescent suicide rates have tripled over the past 60 years—making suicide the second leading cause of death for this generation. 

Research consistently shows that young people grounded in community and meaningful friendships are far less affected by time spent on social media than those without such connections. It is in the absence of these real-life bonds, when digital ties replace authentic interactions, that anxiety and depression escalate. The pandemic has starkly revealed how fragile our social safety nets have become. Isolation and hyper-individualism have deepened, and without access to communal structures, support systems, or shared rituals, mental health falters. What once existed—extended families, generational homes, collectivist frameworks—leaving young individuals to navigate an increasingly complex world alone, often without the grounding exchanges needed to make sense of it. When one is no longer tethered to something larger than the self, the psyche begins to fray.

Sonia Jia has, in recent years, already grieved the lost of two friends to suicide—experiences that forced her into an intimate confrontation with death, but also awakened in her a deeper understanding of friendship as an act of mutual preservation. In cultivating emotional and relational bonds, she gestures toward a form of chosen kinship—a quiet resistance against despair, and a lifeline against the isolating currents of our time.

In this context art for Jia becomes both diagnosis and antidote—tender gestures of resistance that reintroduce slowness, vulnerability, and emotional presence into a cultural climate that privileges speed, detachment, and performative identity. In doing so, the artist taps into an existential dissonance of our time: where freedom sometimes feels like a burden, and the promise of endless digital connectivity only deepens the ache for real, embodied intimacy.

The flesh tones, bruised pastels, or subtle, muted hues of these oil paintings still draw from Jia’s own skin and the skin of those around her—bearing every scar, every trace of past traumas and lived events. As both membrane and filter in our relationship with the world, the skin holds the imprint of experience even before we fully internalize it. At the same time, her layering technique in oil painting is a slow, physical method of embodying memories, and at the same time an act of caring and a meditative refusal of fast-paced consumption and instant output that regulates most of relations in modern society. 

In these new works, however, Jia chooses to revisit not only pain but also joy—moments of depression and delight, pleasure and sorrow—gently layering them through paint as a means of metabolizing rather than repressing, of breathing through emotion rather than suffocating under its weight.

For Jia, a more intimate reflection on the self throughout the other —on emotional behaviors and relationships—becomes a way to distill meaning from experience, to consciously shape one’s personal narrative and forge a coherent identity. As Camus reminds us, pain can act as a catalyst for awakening: stripping away illusions, it brings us face to face with the raw truth of existence. Yet, in this confrontation lies the dignity of rebellion and the possibility of making one’s own choices. 

By voicing challenges, discomforts, and inner unrest within a community, these burdens are allowed to land—gently—into a shared space of reflection. It is this space of existential reflection and collective holding, that renders the absurdities of contemporary life more bearable. Although we are thrown into the world, as Heidegger might put it, without the possibility to choose the circumstances and casualties we have to confront - we still retain the freedom to choose our stance to shape our reaction to events. And on this choice lies what comes next.