Healing Strokes | A Gen Z Artist Explores Personal Pain and Historical Trauma

Hayley Zhao

A Gen Z artist explores trauma and the still-raw legacy of Japanese occupation on canvas

A bare maiden gets down on one knee. She offers a delicate bouquet to another woman, who, in silent reverence, inclines her head closer to the flowers with a lit cigarette. Against a skin-colored backdrop, their unadorned bodies come to life, revealing the presence of scars and veins. The artwork resembles a fragment peeled from an ancient cave painting.

Nearly all Sonia Jia’s recent paintings have this same palette of skin tones mixed with stormy mauve. The 23-year-old artist from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, takes inspiration from both her own past sufferings and the collective trauma of Chinese women during fraught moments of the 20th century to produce her works.

Even though Jia’s career is just beginning, her work already hangs weightily on the walls of Cubism Artspace in Shanghai. When TWOC met her this October, she had just wrapped up a group exhibition at Cubism and was about to embark on her first solo exhibition in the same gallery a week later. Titled “Untouchable,” the exhibition will explore the idea of precarious intimacy—the connection, care, and solidarity formed during perilous circumstances.

“I think in the formation of many intimate relationships, conflict will arise from personal trauma. But at the same time, our shared empathy toward trauma often blurs boundaries between people and allows us to form deeper bonds… That’s what makes the concept of precarious intimacy so captivating to me,” Jia tells TWOC.

Jia’s work has always been centered around the exploration of intimacy and vulnerability. Her artistic expression is part of her way of healing from the sexual trauma she experienced during her childhood.

She often finds solace from her past in books and films. She discovered Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema by Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber, when she was pursuing her Master’s degree in painting at London’s Royal College of Art. The book delves into films that explore tales of sexuality, love, and friendship against the backdrop of violence and exclusion, illustrating how political and economic changes can simultaneously restrict and enable fresh avenues for intimacy.

“[The book] broadened my understanding of the relationships between people and things in my own surroundings,” says Jia. She realizes the harmful relationship brought about by perilous environment does not only exist in herself or others individually. Throughout history, there have been countless people who have been persecuted by wars, and the relationship born out of those circumstances inspired many of the pieces in her solo exhibition.

Raised in Hangzhou, China, Jia is familiar with the country’s tumultuous history in the early 20th century, marked by invasions and attempted colonization. Elderly members of her family often watched TV dramas about Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, and later she too came across movies about the lives of “comfort women”—women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army in occupied territories, such as the 2016 Korean movie Spirits’ Homecoming . Jia was fascinated by the bond formed between these girls and women and began researching the topic further.

She became haunted by the images and depictions of these women in Japanese military doctor Aso Tetsuo’s memoir, From Shanghai to Shanghai , which chronicles his experiences during his stationing in the occupied city from 1937 to 1941. The images also inspired Jia’s “Fading Bruise” series.

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