Blue Mind and Your Aquatic Eyes
Review of the group exhibition Thermocline at Current State (Studio & Gallery), Los Angeles​
by Weifan Mo, February 26, 2026
Xuemeng Li
The Silhouette of Mist, 2022
Image Transfer on Mirror
6 1/4 × 6 1/4 in
Like water as its pitch subtly veers, here vision eerily grows tense. So that the ghost of a former mood is summoned. The auras of the works entwine and shimmer around one another, rippling like liquid silk through eddies of feeling: a velvet hush, a latent inertia, a merciless edge, a veiled expectancy—until, almost inevitably, we find ourselves whispering, in the secret chambers of the heart, that single, luminous word: blue.
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Curator Xumeng Zhang renders blueness as a thematic rebel, staging an ambivalent intertext against blue’s naturalized metaphors of melancholy, and drawing us toward the color’s arcane myths and secrecy, as part of the program hosted by Kiki of Current State Studio. Echoing the fragile line implied by the exhibition’s title Thermocline, blue permeates the intimate affective circuitry binding the spectators and the artworks. Much like a body of water on the verge of a thermal shift, blue’s seductive pull precipitates a sudden mutation in psychic logic, refusing to settle into the comfort of an easily capitulated sadness. Thermocline is a line of tenuous resistance.​
Carried by blues that pulse with a watery drift, it challenges the hierarchical regime through which modern art blithely situates color. Merleau-Ponty’s enticing account of color as the first dimension through which the visible emerges, understood as being of “motor significance,” quietly unsettles a linear, rational, and form-dominated artistic ethos. Color thus ceases to be mere decorative subordination; it throbs with the artists’ latent psychological impulses, a vessel for clandestine and compelling expressiveness. The chromatic visibility hinted by blueness conjures a perceptual and affective space,beckoning us to linger within what it has suggestively opened for us. The color blue here does not factually reaffirm “reality” so much as creates realities through an invitation to the vivacious action of seeing. A vision of aquatic motility. Blue is a verb.
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Across figures, landscapes, and abstractions of movements, thermocline threads through the works as a quietly calming current, one that channels attention and lures the gaze with a mesmerizing aqueous power. Jichen Lu, I Chin Sung, and Yurong Xiao embody blueness as a twisting, coiling motion. Across their disparate textures fabricated, blue tentatively takes shape in entwined vortices, sinuous spirals, and successive whirlpools, each stirs the eyes into interlacing, meandering senses. In Lu’s work, blue arises from the clash of yellow and green, a gradually intensifying presence of absence; Sung’s brushstrokes hover ambiguously over narrative virtual happenings: a hotel, a sudden discovery, an intention flickering like fireworks; A crystalline night sky unfolds in Xiao’s trilogy, the stars ceding their place to the enveloping darkness, letting a nocturnal mood seep through. Then, the mood subtly creeps across the faces of Patrick Chuka’s figures, the floral motifs merge with the contours of the skin, guiding a serene, contemplative gaze from the viewer. The monochrome portraits amplify the character and tension behind each figure; their eyes, surpassing mere features of gestures, radiant with elusive sparks.
I Chin Sung
The Grand Hotel, 2025
Oil and Acrylic on canvas
12 x 9 inch
Jichen Lu
Garden, 2025
Oil on Canvas
31 1/2 × 23 5/8 in
Within these scenes, color does not originate in pigment’s physicality, but in a sentimental cadence that hums beneath the images as still-appearing reaches of the mind. Chong Liu’s foals bound across landscapes bathed in a blue haze, evoking a dizzying, animalistic instinct; cerulean washes through the trees and grass, spreading into a luminosity unique to dawn or dusk. Xuemeng Li’s works are caught in a much coherent luminosity, transformed into an uncanny, spectral fog that permeates his nightmarish wilderness. Here, tinged with near-fear, we are almost sucked into a liminal no-man’s-land yet still haunted by the occasional flicker of human shadows. It is an oneiric intimacy where dreams can momentarily unfold. A David Lynch-like timbre reverberates with these dreams, slicing through the threshold of wee hours, and settling into the moist, eroticized expanse of Yena Park.The figures swim in a blood-like indigo, their visages blurred, dissolved, and cried into the undulations. A continuum of silhouettes. A current of unfinished reveries.
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Surfacing from the dream promises no therapeutic relief, as the show unfurls unbound by contrived assessments. Thermocline shelters a blue mind as a condition that cohabits with psychic complexity, analogous to the unstable stratifications of water thermal variance. States of mind are in constant migration, drift in susurration, as do water and our gaze. Our acts of touch, disturbance, entry, and withdrawal continuously re-tint the field with reverberations of affect. The show thus draws open our spring-clear eyes, borne along by water’s murmuring insistence and spell.
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Weifan Mo (Michelle) (b.2001) is a writer, creator, and curator at the New School for Social Research (Philosophy MA Program), with scholarly interests that encompass aesthetics, phenomenology, affect studies, Ancient Greek philosophy & drama, and Chinese diasporic literature & films. Her academic and creative initiatives revolve around interdisciplinary artistic practices that channel our intellectual life into everyday experience. She employs the project of aesthetics study as a filter to encapsulate the affective dynamics surrounding individuals within modern and postmodern contexts. Her recent curatorial projects include A Lure, A Lament (Jan 16–30, 2026) at Gallery 456 | Chinese American Arts Council, Fleeting Hues of Passage: Duo Exhibition of Wendy Wei & Edmund Bao (Jan 24–Feb 7, 2025) at Gallery 456 | Chinese American Arts Council, and Wearable Ontologies: Ruihaonan’s Box Clothes (Nov 6–Nov 10, 2025) at THE BLANC.
Yena Seo-Yeon Park
There Were Times I Wished to See Your Ghost, 2025
Oil on Cotton
20 × 17 in