Embedded in One’s Flesh and Hair
2026.05.30 - 2026.07.04
Artist: Sonia Jia
Curator: Haoyang WANG
「Spring lingers, and the grasses grow lush.
Life, rooted deep in the soil, surges freely toward the sky — the shape of tomorrow remains unknown.
Where we are displaced, the vegetation runs wild.Drifting to this place, what can we call home?」
Embedded in one’s Flesh and Hair is artist Sonia Jia’s solo exhibition in China after a two-year hiatus, marking a deeper exploration of intimate relationships. When people move ceaselessly through geographic migrations, how are home and identity defined? Accompanying this struggle for definition is the creolisation of language and culture — like the grafting of two distinct soils. When one can no longer belong entirely to a specific region or culture, one becomes like a transplanted plant, generating new symbols from the skin, the tips of the hair, and the textures of everyday life. These symbols entwine with one another, forming a unique cultural genome that belongs solely to the wanderer.
The most intuitive way people define their own identity often unfolds through territoriality. Yet when an individual is in constant movement, identity seems to dissolve into a series of provisional nodes — our understanding of who we are is continuously reconstituted through entanglement with specific environments, generating new singularities. Ferdinand Tönnies says that the construction of modern community follows two distinct original paths: one is the community of blood, corresponding to “intimacy”; the other is the community of place, corresponding to “familiarity.” As the saying goes, oranges grown south of the Huai River are sweet; grown north of the river, they become bitter. The artist’s fusion of the body with rhizomatic plants operates precisely as a visual response to this condition. The metaphor suggests a rhizomatic logic of identity formation: decentered, rootless, perpetually caught in a process of “becoming.”
In her recent works, green and blue have entered the palette of skin tones that previously dominated the canvases. This chromatic expansion signals an inward-to-outward shift in her inquiry: no longer solely focused on the intimate relationships of the individual, but stepping into the space between the individual and the broader social environment. The artist kept a Venus flytrap at home for a long time. One of the few carnivorous plants, the flytrap not only draws nourishment through conventional means but also captures and feeds on insects in its surroundings. This particular mode of survival quietly resonates with the artist’s thinking, and has repeatedly appeared in her paintings as a linguistic sign — lush green flytraps sprawling across the picture plane, roots and stems sprouting from the body. In the blue series, the human body is embedded in a boundless blue expanse of water, as if frozen in a suspended slice of time. With the slow passage of time, crystalline formations begin to precipitate on the body’s surface, as though the sediment of memory and environment were gradually accreting into form.
In her installation, the artist unfolds a painterly perspective that superimposes the macroscopic and the microscopic. The memories stored within the human body interpenetrate and entwine with the landscapes, dwellings, furniture, and vegetation one has seen in the past, forming an inner ecosystem. Wandering neural structures, stored memory, and the landscapes, dwellings, furniture, and plants from the past all merge together. The shape of the Venus flytrap bears a striking resemblance to the caudate nucleus. In her installations, the artist paints the caudate nucleus — the brain region responsible for memory storage — onto silk. The fine, soft, translucent silk is like the ethereal memories drifting in one’s mind. Metal clothes racks, originally used to hang clothes and bedding, are now replaced by equally soft silk paintings and suspended crystal light ornaments. On a drying rack, clean everyday fabrics would normally be hung; here, instead, they bear another material form of memory. Certain memories, perhaps once as heavy as a water-soaked cotton quilt, have been baked and air-dried by time — like the sun — until they gradually shed their weight and arrive at a state of almost “spiritual lightness and renewal.”
The artist’s works operate like a “body without organs” (corps sans organes), continually dismantling the established organizational structure of the organism so that intensities may flow, disperse, and circulate freely across its surface. This resonates with the wisdom of plants: even though plants are rooted in place, they always maintain an outside — within which they form rhizomes with the wind, with animals, or with human beings，and from a certain perspective, animals also form rhizomes; so do humans. Plants grow into our bodies,spreading like consciousness, a reminder that human identity can never be subsumed under any linear, singular definition. In this sense, the exhibition invites viewers to temporarily suspend any fixed image of the “self” and instead perceive in the manner of plants: to see oneself as an open bodily field, and within this symbiotic natural environment, to reimagine the possibilities of identity.
