A DECADE ago, Du Meng moved from Beijing to New York, where she began to study from scratch the art of glass making at Rochester Institute of Technology. She was the first Chinese student enrolled in the university’s glass program. In 2016, Du returned to China and became an independent glass artist. The young woman, who is good at “telling stories via glass,” uses her works to record the precious memories and experience of herself and those around her.

In early 2019, Du’s grandmother passed away. One of Du’s friends also went through a sad experience. These things got Du to think about the emotional bonds between people and their loved ones. She created a series of “letters” from sheet glass. “When you hold the glass and let sunlight shine through it, you will see the glass reflecting images about your surroundings,” Du said.

The series of specially made “letters” was displayed in her latest solo exhibition, “Embers,” which opened at the New York-based Fou Gallery in the United States near the end of November. Talking about the exhibition’s theme, and her works displayed at the exhibition, Du told Women of China, “I visited Lybster, a city in northern Scotland, to attend a conference in August 2018. The place was so wide and open, which gave me a seemingly ‘boundless’ field of vision, and made me feel tranquil.” In December that year, Du visited the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Latvia. She was impressed by the marvelous windows that were decorated with colored stain glass in the academy’s old building. She started to consider the possibilities of creating something from sheet glass.

It took her 10 years to turn from a rookie into a master, and Du had coped with many hardships since she had started her studies in the glass program in Rochester. She was lonely and homesick.

After countless failed works, she made several glass figures of a girl who lowered her head and kept her eyes closed. “I received a long letter from my professor, who told me he could feel that I had gained a lot from my class after one year of study,” Du recalled. She was touched and encouraged by her professor’s feedback.

For her graduation exhibition in 2013, Du displayed glass works that showed images she had often seen during her childhood in Beijing, such as white cloth shoes, swallows and begonia flowers. Her works won praise from her teachers and classmates.

Between 2014 and 2016, Du created many works while serving as an artist in residence in Rochester. “One Day,” a set of glass figures of five girls, was the last work she completed before she moved back to China. The five girls form a circle. If you look at them going clockwise, and from the girl standing first on the left, you will find that the patterns on the girls’ dresses gradually fade away, but that more and more leaves and flowers grow on the girls’ bodies. The leaves and flowers represent the things that inspired Du during her years overseas.

After she returned to China, Du spent a year working in a glass manufacturing plant in Nanxun, an old town in East China’s Zhejiang Province. She started to combine glass with other materials as she progressed in her creative process.

“In the United States or in Japan, if you have been labeled as a glass artist, you will most probably stick with glass as your material,” she said. “However, few people are engaged in this field in China, which gives me more freedom to experiment with different things.” Currently, Du is preparing for two exhibitions in the United States scheduled for later this year. “It’s still difficult to make a comfortable living by creating glass art pieces,” she said. “But I’m okay with that. It’s a universal challengefor all artists, no matter if you are working with music, visual arts or other art forms.”(SD-Agencies)