On Portobello Road, Graffik Gallery's exposed brick and concrete retain traces of London's manufacturing past. Fragile Duration (10–16 December 2024) situates Yvette Yujie Yang's glass sculptures and Shenlu Liu's textile installations within this industrial shell, staging a deliberate encounter between extreme material fragility and the architecture of extraction.



The exhibition operates across incompatible temporal scales. Liu addresses immediate somatic experience, the body's struggle to recalibrate under sensory overload. Yang engages geological time, ecological damage accumulating across generations. Yet the curatorial premise argues these scales share structural dependency. Environmental violence unfolds too gradually to trigger alarm. Perceptual collapse results from inhabiting that slow accumulation without adequate registers for comprehension.

Fragile Duration proposes witnessing as methodology rather than sentiment. Through glass that arrests transformation and textiles that respond to proximity, the exhibition asks what forms of attention prove adequate to damage operating beyond conventional perception. This review argues the answer lies not in reconciling divergent scales but in the productive friction their juxtaposition generates.




The exhibition's spatial choreography establishes its conceptual structure. Entering from Portobello Road, visitors encounter Yang's Quiet Sound, cyanotype prints of extinct species arranged in taxonomic grids. The route then passes through Liu's glowing installations and video work Organalux, where proximity activates light and crystalline forms expand across microscopic to planetary scales. This middle section offers responsiveness and bodily recalibration as possibility.

The path returns to Yang's territory. Caerulea and the Ephemeral series occupy pedestals in the main gallery, lampworked glass frozen mid-transformation, capturing water splash and turbulent flame in permanent arrest. The journey concludes near the exit with Stillness of the Wind, six driftwood branches bearing varying densities of glass foliage. Here organic decay that has already run its course supports artificial permanence destined to outlast its scaffold.

This sequence moves from completed loss through potential adjustment to irreversible transformation and finally coexistence. The arc refuses linear narrative, proposing instead what the curatorial text terms "conciliation," sustained attention to damage without the anesthetic of false solutions.

Blue recurs as chromatic through-line. Cyanotype blue from Quiet Sound, luminous blue in Liu's works, cobalt glass in Yang's sculptures. This consistency operates less as aesthetic coordination than conceptual register, a cold intensity that refuses both warm consolation and absolute darkness. The venue choice similarly frames fragility not as preciousness requiring white-cube protection but as condition examined within the environments producing it. The gallery's industrial bones become part of the argument, extraction's architecture now housing work confronting extraction's consequences.

Quiet Sound establishes forensic rather than romantic terms for ecological mourning. Cyanotype prints show bird skeletons and pressed plants, casualties of Asian rice agriculture expansion, each labeled with Latin taxonomy and arranged in systematic blue grids. The visual language deliberately mimics natural history museums with their archival presentation, clinical classification, and specimen preservation.



Yet this mimicry functions as critique. Yang identifies taxonomic systems as psychological compensation mechanisms. By preserving knowledge of extinct species, we create what she describes as an "anesthetic" permitting continued development without confronting its costs. The cyanotype process itself, historically used for architectural blueprints and documents of construction, becomes implicated. Scientific documentation transforms living ecologies into abstract data, deaths into specimens, enabling progress by converting violence into information. Quiet Sound exposes this operation while performing it, revealing the archive as both record and alibi.

Where Quiet Sound documents already-completed loss, Ephemeral and Caerulea attempt capturing transformation at its critical threshold. Exhibited together for the first time, these series reveal chromatic progression from transparent glass through cobalt blue to deep crimson. This sequence materializes an emotional arc from witnessing toward resistance, though the works themselves expose resistance's futility.



Each sculpture freezes moments that in nature last microseconds. Water mid-splash, flame in turbulent bloom, crystalline structures branching outward. Lampworking permits no revision. Once molten glass cools, structure becomes permanent. Yang works improvisationally, allowing material forces such as viscosity, temperature response, and cooling speed to partially determine form. The resulting pieces exist between organic and abstract, movement suspended in stasis.



The central paradox manifests clearly. Borosilicate glass survives millennia, yet Yang deploys this permanence to capture ephemerality. Transparent pieces suggest incipient change. Blue acknowledges entropy's inevitability. Red marks resistance's climax, heat visualized. But color cannot alter fragility. Red glass shatters as readily as blue. These works compress geological duration and fleeting instant into single objects, embodying what Yang theorizes as "temporal ecology," the unequal distribution of entropy's consequences across species and timescales.

XXXX.X, her digital simulation, extends this inquiry beyond glass's physical constraints. On screen, structures resembling Ephemeral continue growing past the point where heat ceased and material solidified. Scrolling code tracks RGB shifts functioning as temperature metaphor, morphological changes, and entropy calculations. The work makes conceptual operations visible, presenting entropy not as abstract principle but active, quantifiable process. Where glass sculptures freeze single instants, XXXX.X projects forward, simulating transformation that permanence prevents.



Stillness of the Wind, positioned where visitors exit back to Portobello Road, proposes something distinct from both documentation and resistance. Six driftwood branches on white plinths bear lampworked glass foliage in increasing density. Left to right, the series moves from bare weathered wood through gradual glass proliferation until glass dominates its organic support. The arrangement permits contradictory readings. Left to right suggests attempted resurrection, glass "regrowing" on dead wood, futile reversal of completed entropy. Right to left proposes inevitable collapse, artificial order diminishing toward natural chaos. Both interpretations remain valid because both acknowledge the same condition. Wood has finished its decay. Glass attempts temporary order that cannot last.



This is what Yang identifies as conciliation, not acceptance of defeat but sustained proximity to loss. The work marks a shift from mourning completed extinctions toward attending ongoing disappearance. Its quiet presence at the threshold suggests a form of exit practice. Viewers return to the street carrying recalibrated attention rather than solutions or despair.



Liu's textile-silicone installations occupy different temporal terrain. Her P!H!E! series responds to human proximity through capacitive sensing, transforming approach into visible light. These soft structures combine organic vulnerability with industrial polymers, creating what Liu terms "energy chambers" where magnetic vibration shifts from abstraction to palpable experience.

The works address perceptual crisis under continuous overstimulation, offering real-time recalibration rather than permanent arrest. This is neither healing nor transcendence but brief intervals where overstimulated bodies locate temporary stability. Liu proposes adjustment as ongoing process rather than fixed state.

Organalux, her three-minute video, scales this somatic concern cosmically. Crystalline architectures unfold from microscopic vibration to planetary diffusion, dissolving boundaries between cellular and cosmic through speculative digital cosmology. The body appears not as isolated organism but as porous field conducting energies within systems extending beyond human perception. Liu collapses scalar distinctions that Yang maintains, revealing what bodies already perform unknowingly.



In Graffik Gallery's industrial shell, this parallel testimony acquires specific resonance. The architecture that once facilitated extraction now houses work confronting extraction's delayed consequences, a transformation not of redemption but of repurposing. The exhibition demonstrates necessity without providing methodology. If adequate attention to ecological crisis requires perceiving across incompatible timescales simultaneously, what institutions or daily practices might cultivate such perception? That gap between demonstration and application remains the problem to address.