Glass is rarely the medium of choice for large-scale sculpture. Yet Korean artist Eunsuh Choi defies expectations and assumed limitations, exploiting this fragile material at a grand scale to achieve qualities unimaginable in marble, bronze, clay, or wood. Being transparent, glass can serve as a conduit for light. Choi’s sculptures, which are built up of short, thin glass rods, seem to weigh little or nothing—a property we do not traditionally associate with sculpture. Her work evokes suddenly frozen mist or breath—it seems that delicate—other viewers may think of solidified tears or saliva. Numerous discrete, diaphanous lines give rise to geometric or curvilinear bodies as airy as three-dimensional cobwebs. Some of Choi’s iconography has antecedents in Surrealism, and her occasional cubes and rectangles trace their ancestry back to Minimalism, though in her works, the intricate lacework of glass speaks of a very different sensibility.
