1. INCANDESCENT Review
By Yueqi Chen
Incandescence, a state indicates tension, energy, and even explosion; just as what the
three artists of the exhibit INCANDESCENT in Swell gallery explore the relationship
between their internal expedition and the external space, working with different
medium, in a both calm and powerful manner.
INCANDESCENT transforms the rectangular gallery white space into an artificial
and radiant landscape, combining sculptures, installations, and photography, a
multi-layered, dynamic, organic physical field, and inviting audience to look at and
even touch or be in the art works.
Ella Faktorovich’s sculptures invite the audience confronting both exquisitely beauty
and extremely pain at the same time. The tension of the opposite is obvious in her
works. Just as what Marx once pointed out, that everything seems pregnant with its
contrary, considering herself as modern-day alchemist, Faktorovich strives to
transform the externality by changing the internality, through exploring the duality,
the opposites, the in-betweeness in all things.
Her choice of material, mainly glass, is such a subtle substance, which is fragile
enough to be deconstructed but also can be confrontational enough to deconstruct.
What the black blown shapes of the piece Eve and reddish glass rods of Unholy
deconstruct, is not only the physical space we are in, but also can apply to our
psychological states. The sharp, shining, smooth glass robs are sparkling with
reflection in laser and lights, according to the artist, adding the scientific theatricality
to the works. The process working with glass itself is a physically, chemically precise
process, also with the material, plastic, which is used in the sculpture, The 9th
Circle.
The chemical reaction happening within the substance of Faktorovich’s sculptures
also resonates with the invisibility of the exhilarating and sometimes even frightening
energy flow, or life force, lies within the seemingly static color, pattern, and materials.
Hui Meng Wang also explores such relationship between the seemingly static state
and the internal isolating integrity in her photography, The Isolation Book II. Both the
actual scenes in the city landscape of San Francisco, and an imaginary “dreamland”
mentally isolating the artist from the external physicality. The neon-like, unnatural
colors and strong shadows in her photographs, according to the artist, a metaphor of
mental journey and struggles through isolation. In many ways, these images can be
seen as her psychological self-portrait. As Marcel Proust pointed out, self-seclusion
can be made based on a deranged love of the crowd, Wang is trying to define the
subtle line between getting attention and being in isolation. Choosing the ordinary
scenes in the San Francisco city life as the subjects, the geometrical composition, the
neon-like color palette, indicates the liminal constructed order and the cloistered inner

2. incandescence.
In the closing space of the Swell gallery, there’s Chrisina Walley’s installation piece,
Energy Connection. Bodies and landscapes are the concepts Walley explores in her
light, lines and plastic cuboids combing installation. In her works, apart from these
physical materials, the shadow casted by the stretching lines in the space, and the
space itself also constitute the artificial landscape in the gallery space. Her another
piece, Energy Connection, being installed and hovered in a semi-open space, inviting
audience to be the human body interact with the artificial landscape in the gallery
space, to think about the individual relationship between their corporeal existence and
the landscape they inhabit in a broader sense. Once again, the seemingly static
hovering lines and white cuboids imply a multivalent, moving, mental, and physical
relationship between man and space.
Although different in medium, forms, and content, all three artists convey their
incandescence both introversively and extroversively, no matter in a more overt and
explicit manner, or a more concealed and metaphoric way. And just as the constantly
vibrant tension of the incandescent state, here comes with the historical moment
happening on the opening night: the explosion of a supposed mechanically-stable
chocolate fountain! Maybe that is exactly the kind of unexpected moments that altered
the individual internal expeditions, further altering our external world.
In incandescence, we live, and transform.