As the temperature in Hong Kong ticks slowly upward toward 28 degrees Celsius, flying saucers steadily emerge from seven dark flat voids. This isn’t an alien invasion or archangels descending from Heaven, but the slow revelation of Aryo Toh Djojo’s groundbreaking new series of thermochromic paintings. These works on canvas come to life—as much as inanimate painted surfaces can be literally brought to life—through subtle shifts in room temperature, fluid circumstances that determine the visibility of the imagery.

Across the room from these heat-sensitive apparitions hover three soft-edged abstract paintings, born from the artist's interest in drone music, transcendental meditation, and photographic light leaks. Thermally reactive like the UFO images, the color field paintings reveal and conceal nonrepresentational chromatic atmospheres, suggestive of the inner energetic spaces we human beings can access through deep meditation.

The paintings in this room are immersed in a quiet, layered soundscape created by four separate tracks playing on CD players around the gallery. The tracks loop manipulated field recordings, drone, and fragments of melody, an approach inspired by a workshop Aryo took with Brian Eno. Each track runs at a different length, so they never quite align, amplifying the thermal paintings' slippery, shifting, and ever-indeterminate spatial condition.

The hallway leading to the second gallery offers two contemplative moments during passage. A painting of a long, sinewy candle flame burns with devotional intensity. Another depicts the serene blue head of Siddhartha, echoing Buddhist statuary, set against a bright white ground. These works form a hinge—offering a pivotal moment of prayer before plunging into the intensity of the second gallery.

In the adjacent space, we are surrounded by highly realistic airbrush paintings, each with its own surreal narrative. Aryo uses larger canvases and traditional acrylic paint here to probe mysticism and the unknown. These are mostly representational works, save for a couple of light leak-inspired abstractions, all existing in a sci-fi/spiritual slipstream.

If the first room unfolds slowly and the hallway offers a pause, this gallery reads like a sequence of sharp mythological, extraterrestrial transmissions. A giant six-fingered hand waves—or grasps—at us from one canvas, an allusion to the alien DNA some speculate lies buried in our human genome. A nude female figure appears in another composition; for Aryo, she is a spirit guide, possibly part alien, her presence marked by ambiguity and a steady, searching gaze. In another, a jet-black orb hovers above a flat, nondescript horizon, promising heavy existential oblivion.

Elsewhere in the second gallery, a blurry, seemingly photographic extraterrestrial being emerges—complete with the oversized forehead and glassy eyes of alien lore. Despite their varied forms, the images in this room share a common gravity: a desire to find meaning in the mysteries that lie just beyond our optical reach, and just past the threshold of the truths we carry inside.

Beneath both galleries' sci-fi narratives and shifting thermochromic surfaces lies a dense web of spiritual and mythological symbolism that points as much to the soul as it does out to the stars. Aryo draws from esoteric systems such as chakra alignments, angelic hierarchies, Native American folklore, ancient cosmologies to suggest that healing, transformation, and contact with the unknown are all connected. The number seven recurred frequently in his research: seven chakras, seven archangels turned saucers, Seven Sisters (aka the Pleiades). In Aryo’s thermochromic installation, the seven saucer paintings operate less from a fixed belief system and more as provisional scaffolding—a set of learned tools for navigating both inner and outer realms.

From biblical messengers of divine will to the Pleiades star cluster (central to both Greek mythology and ufology), Aryo folds millennia of human speculation into a visual language that feels unmistakably Californian. His work resists dogma, suggesting instead that spiritual insight might arrive not as a stone tablet, but as a flicker, a resonance, or a frequency felt below the belt. And it might just appear as something sprayed on smooth from a body shop paint applicator—like a Kandy Kolored Tangerine-flake flame of automotive paint.

Swapping out his paint brushes marked a turning point in Aryo’s practice. The airbrush, Aryo’s sole painting tool, is no accident; it feels somehow geographic, a material signifier of his West Coast vantage point. It gave him a new way to think about space—not just pictorial, but emotional and energetic.

With the introduction of thermochromic materials, the paintings became even more responsive to the air around them, always at the mercy of their environment. The atmosphere became a collaborator. Blown through the airbrush, the warm, expansive sky above every ranch house and long stretch of highway west of the Continental Divide seeps into the DNA of each composition.

Aryo’s paintings don’t offer answers; they model a way of being with uncertainty, a way of seeking. The exhibition is haunted by the living presence of a weird spinning disc, glimpsed way off near the horizon through a hazy sky. A Tangerine-flake transmission sinking toward the edge of the Pacific, it leaves us anticipating that fleeting green f lash, listening for nothing but the soft droning hum of a muscle car disappearing south down Highway 1, the sound slowly fading toward oblivion.

Text by Jan Dickey

About the artist

Aryo Toh Djojo studied at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. Aryo employs an airbrushing technique as a central facet of his artistic process, skillfully incorporating principles of design, such as visual perspective, color theory, and an examination of the formal elements of art, to experiment and shape his paintings. Notably, he draws inspiration from the likes of Gerhard Richter, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Richard Prince. Much of his oeuvre is situated within the urban fabric of Los Angeles, thus resonating with the city's distinct subcultures.

Aryo Toh Djojo's intimate encounters with the familiar seamlessly intertwine with those of an otherworldly nature. The artist adeptly combines elements of science fiction and satire, occasionally inserting iconic landmarks of Los Angeles as a backdrop. He blurs the boundary between photographic representation and a glimpse into the enigmatic realm where his conscious and subconscious intersect. This artistic fusion prompts viewers to question their perception, as they navigate the evocative landscapes that Aryo meticulously constructs.