Murmuration

THE BLANC is pleased to show Murmuration, a solo presentation by Chicago-based artist Jiaming You (b. 1991), curated by Leo Yuan.

On autumn and winter evenings, European starlings gather in vast, shape-shifting swarms of up to hundreds of thousands. They swoop, swirl, and weave through the sky in synchronized, sweeping waves. This mesmerizing phenomenon is known as a murmuration.

For her latest project, Jiaming You transforms the walls and windows of the gallery into an expansive field of flight with flocks of acrylic, mirror, and wood panels in the shape of bird silhouettes. Drawing on the fluid choreography of bird swarms, Murmuration maps the intricate coordinates of the human condition, situating the singular self within the collective, while weighing systemic restrictions of movement against the longing for freedom, and rigid earthly borders against humanity’s small yet profound place in the universe.

The three distinct materials chosen by the artist—mirror acrylic, color-tinted translucent acrylic, and painted wood panels—each draw upon a specific reference, embodying a unique facet of You’s recent artistic and personal encounters.

The painted wood panels are layered with a color palette extracted from her father’s fMRI brain scans with imagery of the solar system and distant galaxies from NASA and Australia Powerhouse Museum archive. In late 2025, upon learning of her father’s medical emergency in Shanghai, You felt “split into three selves”: a daughter longing to return home, an artist seeing “fireworks in the brain” in fMRI scans, and a foreigner bound by travel constraints. Fearing that leaving might jeopardize her legal standing to return, she eventually made the tough decision to stay behind during his recovery. On painted wood panels layering her father’s brain scans with galaxy imagery, the artist contrasts humanity’s grand ambition of cosmic travel with the simple, urgent wish for uninhibited human passage.

The tinted acrylic pieces bear fragments of a 1975 letter written by Bernie Lo—a prominent  social worker in the south side of Chicago—to the city's mayor, advocating for her own expedited visa to travel to Hong Kong for her gravely ill father-in-law. This historical immigration predicament mirrors You’s limbo, while paying homage to the Chicago Chinese diaspora to which the artist belongs.

Each mirror acrylic bird is etched with fragments of Tian Wen Tu, a 13th-century Chinese celestial map. While the original stone stele resides in Suzhou, You sources her imagery from an ink rubbing held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, transferring selected details onto the reflective surfaces. Informed by her own time in Australia, the work weaves ancient cosmic navigation together with her own personal journeys.

In addition to the bird panels, You also crafted several window-inspired works that explore the concept of the window as a portal. Combining painted cosmic backdrops with hinged glass panels, these pieces feature bird-shaped cutouts that reveal the painted nebulae beneath. By framing interstellar vistas within familiar architectural forms, You presents the window as a site of longing—a physical threshold bridging interior confinement with the vast, unconstrained expanse of the universe.

Through this rich tapestry of personal archive, historical memory, and cosmic cartography, Murmuration transforms individual constraint into a site of collective resonance—reminding us that while unpredictable conditions may bind our physical movement, our impulse toward freedom remains as boundless as the cosmos.

Artist

Jiaming You is a painter and installation artist based in Chicago. Her work explores the theme of migration and identities through examining the relationship between physical surroundings and psychological moments—how individuals perceive themselves and how the environments they inhabit project back onto them. Combining industrial processes such as latex printing and laser cutting with painting by hand, and utilizing both personal and historical archives, Jiaming’s work showcases how identities are built, negotiated, and rediscovered within transnational migrations and a constantly shifting social landscape.

Jiaming received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2022) and BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2018). She was awarded the SAIC International Graduate Student Scholarship (2021), Oxbow Merit Scholarship (2022), and Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship (2022). Residency experiences include Conversation in Practice (2022) and Longform Residency (2022) at Ox-Bow, and Pollinator Residency (2025, 2026). Her work has been exhibited in Madison, Chicago, Newhaven, Los Angeles, New York, and Beijing. Art fair experiences include Beijing Contemporary Art Fair 2024, and Shanghai Art021 Art Fair 2024. Publications about her work can be found on Artnet, Whitehot Magazine, Sina News, NEWCITY, Artdaily, Art Insider, Chicago Reader, and Sixty Inches From Center.