Vesper Wanting Jia (b. 1999, China) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the limit of language and the immediacy of embodied experience through a poetics of materiality. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago. She is currently based in Lyon, France, where she continues her research at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon.

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Shaped by her cross-cultural experience, her practice navigates the friction and fluidity between bodily, affective, and symbolic landscapes, where she seeks to embrace the contradictory, speak the unspeakable, and question what it means to be human and to connect with the Other. Drawing on Western discourse on eroticism and Eastern philosophy of impermanence, her work engages with visceral and ephemeral materials such as ice, sugar, rust, skin, and butter. They melt, stain, crystallize, and decay — their sensuality and transience embody both emotional immediacy and layered cultural memory. In them, concept becomes flesh, and silence begins to speak. 

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Having exhibited internationally across France, the US, and China, her work continues to unfold between geographies, where the translation of language, body, and emotion remains both inevitable and impossible, a gesture at once of survival and of resistance. From this tension, her art emerges as a tender offering: raw, unresolved, and irreducibly embodied.