“Checking In” by Hugh Jia 

Real Estate: Hugh Jia at Gallery 233

The first time I meet Hugh Jia, he greets me in the lobby of his Williamsburg apartment building with a roll of paper towels. It is an act of generosity, and, considering I am dripping from my hair, clothes, and “waterproof” backpack, somewhere between help and mere ceremony. On my bike ride over, I’d gotten caught in one of those New York summer rainstorms that feels generational then comes back every two or three weeks. The epic, the mythic, the mundane: as I squelch around his apartment looking at the new paintings he’ll show later that night, the world I’m in gives way to a more densely allegorical one where these scales of narrative crash into one another, becoming not muddy but clear, even clarifying.

Later that night, two hundred or so people will come to “Gallery 233” to see Jia’s work, along with photo transfers, paintings, and illustrations by Jia’s friends, Geist Topping and Phoebe Quin Kong. We sit to talk in a brightly lit room where four or six of Jia’s new paintings hang (he is still deciding whether some are finished, or whether that matters).  The apartment is stocked with a restaurant’s worth of wine, and Jia has moved all major furniture into his bedroom-studio. We walk around, looking at the paintings on display.

“Have You Seen My Keys” by Hugh Jia

In “Have You Seen My Keys,” a round, red figure presses its face against a grate in the ground while another peeks out from a yellow, uniformly hilly landscape. In “Last Stop,” two lines of figures stand on perpendicular sides of a staired arch, on top of which another figure appears to direct them. “Reaching for the Moon’s Reflection” shows these figures in near-silhouette, climbing on top of one another from the bottom of the canvas to the top. In the show’s centerpiece, the towering “Museum on an Island,” three similar figures sit on the edge of some great grey wall half-covered in blinding light; in a corner of almost complete darkness, one figures stands, and another crouches on neatly cut grass, looking out at the viewer.

“Museum on an Island” by Hugh Jia

Jia’s lines are crisp, his rendering of shadows and folds of (human?) skin at once sharp and luscious. The colors here might jar, but no surface is left plain; the light dancing on the otherwise smooth wall of “Museum” makes for as interesting a scene as the groupings above or below. The diagonal line of shadow that slices the painting in two is testament to Jia’s compositional eye, made manifest equally in “Keys,” “Stop,” and “Reaching.” I name all this, and Jia answers; this is the kind of small talk one makes in this situation, when one is confronted with all the scale of myth but none of its familiar tone. He opens his furniture-packed bedroom, and we squeeze in so he can show me some earlier pieces, which prove more manageable—or smaller, at least—places to start.

“Marooned,” a six-panel narrative in colored pencil made in 2025, depicts two rotund figures against only the paper they’re drawn on as they look at whatever vessel has left them stranded. As the story moves along, one blames the other; one sulks; one worries over the other’s exhausted (or unconscious?) body; and they sit back to back, either in reconciliation or necessity. Jia has rendered them in reds, greens, blues, and yellows: stripes of movement rather than surfaces of skin. The bodies are intricate, shadows from nowhere changing the bright lines of the first few panels into dark blues. The figures have fingers and toes but no faces, belly buttons but no hair (“Hair is cultural,” Jia tells me; these figures exist somewhere before or after anything recognizable). In this environmental vacuum, “Marooned” is at once beautiful and taxonomic, like a Muybridge motion study rendered in vibrant color.

“Marooned” (detail) by Hugh Jia

I ask Jia what he calls the figures in his paintings and drawings. Characters? People? Men? “Travelers,” he tells me. He pulls a few small canvases out from under blankets, behind the TV, over on a desk. This other series, “Checking In,” which he started in 2020 and ended in 2025, proves somewhat illustrative. Travelers—these ones smooth, red, and similarly bald—pull back what appear to be fabric panels of sky, looking out of the picture plane at viewers through eyes that are nothing but cloudy blue sclera. “People have told me that they’re creepy,” Jia says, “but I find them kind of funny and childlike.” They smile with full teeth; their fingernails are long and homogenous. Creepiness figures, sure, but the unweatheredness of these figures, their innocence and repeated demonstration that not even the sky is above questioning and reality-testing, does carry with it a certain charm. If the world these travelers have come to is strange, they resist estrangement. A noble perspective, there on the other side of the canvas.

Not so in these new pieces. “These aren’t travelers, really,” Jia tells me as we reenter the gallery space, “they’re more like guests, or tourists looking at ruins.” The unsettling curiosity of “Checking In” has given way to mere striving (“Reaching”) or stagnancy (“Museum”) in this new, unnamed series. The figures in “Last Stop” line up, à la Blazing Saddles, in front of a single architectural feature that poses no meaningful obstruction to an otherwise barren landscape. Some of the figures turn elsewhere or contort their bodies, but in these worlds which once, perhaps, made sense, protrusions of archaic codes teach these bodies how to act. What do the keys in “Keys” go to? Wherefore ownership, in this smoothed-over land with no doors and no locks? There is the same not-quite-condescending, not-quite-pessimistic tone of early existentialism here, the supposedly necessary revealed as not necessary at all. The figures on top of the wall in “Museum” look out in the blinding light; the figures in darkness relax, maybe complacent, maybe just content.

“Last Stop” by Hugh Jia

Jia reassures me that whatever synonym of choice thematizes these paintings may be inspired by, but are “not only about a quarter-life crisis.” The abstractness of the landscapes and outside-culture-ness of the figures make them nice screens for projection, or commons on which the many artistic, literary, and theoretical traditions that have described this kind of crisis might meet. When I tell a friend who joins me later at the show that Jia works in commercial real estate by day, she suggests he must have a direct line to god. I’d thought something similar, though less pithy; to those of us still shaking a confusion between artistic integrity and purity (see: snobbery), it is hard to resist a kind of anthropological impulse in this situation. While it is easy to imagine the tactility of blue-collar and domestic labor leading to vivid artworks, and it seems like an impossible task to think of where the corporate meets the artistic in ways less—ahem—conceptual than Warhol or Koons. Shouldn’t that kind of work (smooth, glossy, inhuman) preclude this kind of art (figurative, wrought, even spiritual)?

But why ask, “How does an artist work in commercial real estate?” when we should be asking, “What tactility, materiality, humanity do I deny when I ask such a question?” First of all, Jia’s artistic training goes back years, even generations: his father is the artist Bo Jia, whose still lives contain a similar sharpness to his son’s, and whose ceramics (he largely stopped painting professionally a decade or two after leaving China for Washington, D.C.) show up in every corner of his son’s apartment. Jia has patiently developed his skill, technique, and practice, the work of patient creation an act of optimism itself. But even more, perhaps the anthropological is the point. What do people do all day, and what kinds of work does a person do to make other work possible for them, and what does work mean at all, and when did that all happen? Re-materialize; make work work-ier. Estrangement, it turns out, might be a virtue; what we really can’t afford is alienation.

Admittedly, I have gotten into the habit of asking each person I meet who works in the corporate world a set of questions that starts with, “What’s real estate,” or “What’s consulting,” and usually ends with, “What’s your favorite thing about your job?” It is a genuine curiosity, though I am embarrassed to admit that I most often expect, even look forward to, the final queries being non-starters. I ask Jia about the specifics of his work, and he explains generously. I follow up with something I worry is too on-the-nose: how does he think about space in his paintings? The crises of work, of career, often lead to ideas for pictures, he tells me; these loose allegories come from real interaction abstracted and re-formed. But environments appear so much more presently in these paintings than before. I look at the uniform grass in “Museum,” the wall and railing which must have been made by someone, out of frame or out of time. Immaterial things like the state leave some affective charge through infrastructure, maintenance, architecture—evidence of care and labor exist as much inside the world of these paintings as in Jia’s brushstrokes.

Guests on the roof during the Gallery 233 exhibition

When I return to Jia’s apartment for the show, the room is already packed, as is the roof, where a few bands play late into the night. England has just beaten Norway in the World Cup quarterfinals; many inside the gallery wear jerseys or hold paraphernalia distributed at whatever Williamsburg bar they’ve just come from. Art freaks, corporate types, a number of people dressed like Teddy Boys: whatever strange mix comprises the show’s attendance doesn’t exactly make sense. Throughout the night, this is frequently refreshing. I spend some time on the roof, then stop in the apartment where a few people linger, talking. On both sides of the canvas: space, maintenance, many kinds of imperfect connection. I get stuck looking at the wall in “Museum on an Island,” and in that plain, unplain surface comes the dumb thought that I am kind of in a museum on an island, then the last stanza of that Elizabeth Bishop poem, the one that ends, “Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody waters the plant, / or oils it, maybe.” For their brilliance, these paintings work as myth against myths, injunctions not to miss the hands that do the right or wrong thing. No matter. Jia passes by me, picking up some cups, and I can’t help thinking what it takes.

“Museum on an Island” by Hugh Jia with a forgotten World Cup fan