Noctilucent: On Fissures, Echoes and Imperfect Subjectivity

The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Noctilucent unfolds within the faint glow of London’s Espacio Gallery from 30th October to 4th November 2025, drawing viewers into the boundary layer between consciousness and dreams with a light that is both near-constant and fleeting. The works are not arranged around a singular theme but gather silently in the darkness like noctilucent clouds, constructing a shared perceptual language through fragments, mist, echoes, and soft textures. Upon entering the exhibition space, it ceases to be a mere display and instead unfolds as a slowly revealing spiritual landscape: time dilutes, bodies fold, memories begin to shift, and identities re-examine themselves within the fissures of light and shadow.

Whispers of Time, 2024, Zhengwei Fan. The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Xiao Ge’s Echo Bridge utterly liberates time and space from mutual dependence. Within the digital imagery, the bridge ceases to be a physical structure and instead becomes a psychological threshold: a path endlessly repeated and rewritten, yet perpetually unreachable. The fog, sound waves, and suspended bridge fragments create a drifting spiritual atmosphere throughout the exhibition. Meanwhile, Zhengwei Fan’s drawing Whispers of Time treats time as if lightly smudged by fingers, with figures and landscapes slowly settling into the depths of memory. Xiao Ge’s digital fractures and Zhengwei Fan’s painterly softening create a remarkable intertextuality within the exhibition, one delays time, the other dilutes it, yet both explore how we are shaped by time and how we rediscover ourselves within its fissures.

The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Meanwhile, Ke Qin’s Swaying Within, rooted in psychological rhythm, translates swaying, restlessness, silence, and glare into visual language, abstracting the experience of spiritual dissonance into tremors at the level of imagery. This internal oscillation, coupled with the external flickering of light, enables viewers to not merely “see” but “feel” an internal collapse and reorganisation unfolding within the exhibition. At the exhibition’s opposite end, M L Zero’s Tiles As Flowing Memories Shore extends the discourse on time and identity through the ‘materialisation of memory.’ She visually resists linear temporality, rendering memory as a tidal ebb and flow—this formal fluidity, alongside Echo Bridge’s reverberant drift and Whispers of Time’s silent duration, collectively forms the exhibition’s temporal foundation.

Chillin in the bathtub, 2025, Cathalina Navarro Lagos. The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

Honey Baker’s works Between Petals and Thorns, Mary Jane, and Camomile imbue emotion with a soft yet unsettling tactility. This nuanced sensibility, alongside Cathalina Navarro Lagos’s collaged oil paintings, M L Zero’s memory fragments, and Zhengwei Fan’s temporal haze, collectively form the exhibition’s multi-layered exploration of the ‘inner world’.

The Installation view of “Noctilucent” at the Espacio Gallery, London.

As a whole, Noctilucent presents a ‘landscape of proximity’ in both form and concept, where all works illuminate one another within a noctilucent glow. The contributions from Cathalina Navarro Lagos, Xiao Ge, Ke Qin, M L Zero, Honey Baker, Zhengwei Fan, and K M Bosy collectively form not a narrative universe, but a ‘ field of consciousness in the making ’. Here, the subject is no longer required to be complete, memory no longer demanded to be clear, identity no longer expected to be stable. True light is never bright; it flickers just as it is about to vanish. And we, too, often encounter that unfinished self anew within such faint glow.