Lingyi Hu (Ada)

In the Becoming

What is molten glass when it is not asked to become a functional object? 
What can glass become when it is breathing and moving on its own will?
What does it feel like to be alive at 1650°F?

Glass, in its molten state, exists in continuous flux, neither stable nor with a fixed boundary. It resists direct  apprehension. In this thesis, I approach glass as a material whose vitality emerges through motion, reaction, and change. Glass thinks, remembers, and carries time within its movement. Actions taken in the molten state—interruptions, reactivations, and pauses—are not preserved as gestures, but translated into form as traces of the material itself.

With wonder as a guiding philosophy and alchemy as a working method, my practice approaches form making as a temporary condition that opens onto further inquiry. Display becomes an extension of this process: a way of structuring how these works are encountered, how much information is revealed, and how viewers are invited to look. Image-making similarly operates not as documentation alone, but as a secondary site 
of translation—extending perception beyond the limits of the naked eye and allowing this information to surface through mediated vision.

Ultimately, this thesis proposes glass as a medium that invites us to dwell within process rather than mastery. By working with instability rather than against it, the work asks viewers to encounter material not as an inert substance, but as an active field of becoming—one that calls for attentiveness, unlearning, and a willingness to move toward the unknown.

What Arrives Denies Us
2026
Glass, Walnut, Padauk
Glass 22 x 40" (HxW), Wood Support 40 x 45 x 18" (HxWxD)
Working Time: 160 Hours

What Arrives Denies Us uses glass as a field of distortion through which mapped points become unstable and partially unreachable. Referencing astronomical imaging and star navigation systems, the work considers how light, time, and distance shape perception. What appears immediate is already delayed, translated, and transformed before it arrives to us. 

Distillation of Nine
2025
Glass, Padauk 
3 x 36 x 5" (HxWxD)
Working Time: 96 Hours

Distillation of Nine consists of fifty-three slices cut from a single cast glass form originally compressed from nine blown vessels holding glass mixes. The cuts not only reveal what is inside, but also produce new surfaces, new edges, and new absences. To see the work is to pass through it in time. 

Distillation of Nine (Print)
2025
Glass, Print
Working Time: 96 Hours

This series presents the sliced sections of Distillation of Nine as a grid of images, where each frame records a different position through the cast form. Rather than offering a single, stable view, the work unfolds as a sequence of internal conditions where color and flow shifting across each slice. The grid holds these fragments together while allowing discontinuities to remain visible, positioning the image as a method of moving through the material.

19:30---30 November, 2025
2025
Glass, Mahogany, Silica Sand, Prints
8 x 38 x 6" (HxWxD)
Working Time: 92 Hours

This work stage glass in a suspended condition between forming and collapsing. Thirty-two cast rock forms reheated together and allowed to soften, melt, and flow across a wooden structure without containment. Rather than fixing the material into a resolved form, the work preserves a moment where gravity, heat, and accumulation remain active—where the glass continues to negotiate its own boundaries. 

On Edge of Seeing 
2026
Glass, Print
Glass 3 x 2 x 1/2" (HxWxD), Print 102 x 115" (WxH)
Working Time: 26 Hours

On Edge of Seeing stages a shift in scale between a small glass sample and a large printed image derived from it. What begins as a contained material fragment expands into an immersive visual field where boundaries dissolve and orientation becomes unstable. The work considers how images extend, translate, and reframe material conditions, positioning perception at the threshold where recognition begins to break down. 

The Seeds
2025
Glass
4 x 6 x 2" (HxWxD)
Working Time: 84 Hours

The Seeds considers glass as a material capable of holding incomplete transformation. These forms originate from interrupted casting conditions, where internal reactions were paused before reaching resolution. Later reintroduced to heat, the seeds were reactivated and expanded within hot clear glass suggesting the idea of growth. The glass becomes the document of its own formation. 

Harvesting Blue
2024
Glass
Dimensions: 78 x 100" (WxH)
Working Time: 152 Hours

Harvesting Blue gathers a field of 100 hand-blown glass sheets that hold variations of blue as a suspended condition rather than a fixed color. Installed as an array, each panel registers slight shifts in density, gradient, and transparency, producing a fragmented but continuous field. The work draws from the experience of looking upward into the gaps between structures where blue appears as an ungraspable space that invites pause, drift, and projection.