Portrait

For the Armory 2022 Workplace proposed a two-person booth, in which new works by Miko Veldkamp and Olivia Jia will be presented at the fair for the first time. 

Olivia Jia is interested in the systems that we use to organise knowledge and for her bird book series she looks at the cataloguing of animals, in particular rare and endangered species. Although hyperreal, Jia’s still-lifes are never a literal reproduction of existing objects and images, but instead they are compositions of disparate elements which the artist puts together to allude to new metaphorical, narrative, and subtextual relationships between them. 

Miko Veldkamp was born in Suriname and grew up in the Netherlands before relocating to the US. His work is a response to living across dispersed geographies and the ways in which his identity has shifted in the process of navigating degrees of otherness. Upon first glance his compositions are vibrant and playful, but incorporated elements such as coca and tobacco leaves represent both the beauty and the cultivated danger hidden within a fructified landscape. These imagined spaces are drawn from the artist’s memories and represent the felt experience of wandering. ​​The artists’ non-Western background will be a focus for the booth, where the presented works will have subtle references to Asian diasporas and colonialism. 

Veldkamp’s and Jia’s heritages have moved them to question how certain symbols and artifacts assume different meanings across geographies and cultures and these personal investigations are reflected throughout their oeuvre.


Workplace's booth at The Armory Show, New York, 2022 with works by Olivia Jia and Miko Veldkamp 

The Armory Show

Olivia Jia | Miko Veldkamp

Related Artists

Olivia Jia

Miko Veldkamp