Xibei (Sonia) Jia (b.2000) is a Chinese artist born in Odessa, Ukraine. Jia completed her undergraduate degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, 2023.
Concerned with precarious and ambiguous affections and intimacies, Sonia's paintings are a visual reflection on one’s complexities, exploring how people seek and fit to one another. Working from her own diaries, emotions, traumas, and irrational reflections across oil and canvas, pottery, plaster casting, and moulding, her paintings and installations aim to dissolve interpersonal boundaries and foster unfaltering solidarities. Deeply inspired by the body and its powerful healing abilities, her muted palettes draw from bruising, scarring, wrinkled skin, and remembrances of small intimacies to create painterly realms of connectivity where artist and viewer all join in continuity.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Milan, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and London. She lives and works between Hangzhou, Shanghai, Chicago and London.