Olivia Jia: Garden Path

12.26 is pleased to present Garden Path, a new body of work by Philadelphia-based painter Olivia Jia. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Jia’s small canvases depict opened books, photographs, and crisp, creased, unfolded papers, among other objects and ephemera of symbolic significance. The exhibition’s title, Garden Path, evokes the setting of a Traditional Chinese garden with its intricate leak and lattice windows embedded in garden walls, serving as framing devices that focus attention on compositions of the natural world. A painting of a book in the first gallery opens to pages displaying, on the left, a cropped image of a woman intimately grasping the arm of another, and, on the right, a bramble of leafless tree limbs, framed in a window, aching to touch the full, lit moon. While Jia’s paintings are representative of objects, people, and ephemera, they’re also reflective of the artist’s narrative path. In what the artist describes as psychological self-portraits, Jia manifests memory palaces full of treasures and images holding reverence for her heritage as a child of Chinese immigrants. Another open book portrays an ornate snuff bottle from the Qing Dynasty with carnelian adornments, beside an ornamental Kingfisher feather hairpin. Nearby, viewers may gaze upon an unfolded paper with a picture of a Kingfisher preening its feathers in a nocturnal palette of greyish blues and virulent green, fluorescent highlights; this work and others by the artist evoke the technique of Huaniaohua, or bird-and-flower painting. Paintings of ephemera include a set of ivory gloves with delicate lace cuffs seemingly floating in a star-filled cosmos. Embedded between the almost pinkish gloves rests a small photograph of the artist’s grandmother. Other works depict ancient Chinese artifacts such as a statuette of a harpist, an unfired, bodiless clay head of an attendant, a rustic amphora with dragon-head handles, and a brush pot with foliage motifs. Walking past white gallery walls, greeted every few feet by illuminated canvases, is like looking through a garden window, offering new sightlines to explore. And although the exhibition is in the gallery, each work takes viewers on a path to the garden, literally and metaphorically. Olivia Jia (b.1994, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Jia received her BFA in 2017 from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Recent solo exhibitions include BANK, Shanghai, China (2025); Margot Samel, New York, NY (2025); Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Margot Samel, New York, NY (2023); and Workplace, London, UK (2022). Selected group shows include Uffner & Liu, New York, NY (2025); Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2025); Pangée, Montreal, Canada & Margot Samel, New York, NY, (2024); Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany (2024); 12.26, Dallas, TX (2023); Workplace, London, UK (2023, 2022); Margot Samel, New York, NY (2022); Yee Society, Hong Kong (2022); and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA (2022), among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Palm Springs Museum, CA; the H+ Museum in Suzhou, China; and the Zuzeum Art Center in Riga, Latvia.