June 09, 2025
Crowning achievement: SIU Carbondale glass MFA student earns top award
CARBONDALE, Ill. — An intricate glass headdress by a Southern Illinois University Carbondale Master of Fine Arts student that represents desire, glory and the emptiness that they can bring, recently earned top honors in a student exhibition at the international Glass Art Society (GAS) conference.
“Crown of Glass: Yang Guifei” by Nancy Yu earned first place in the organization’s Evolution 2025: A Showcase of Emerging International Talent. The conference was May 14-17 in Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas.
“I was very honored to win the competition as there were many strong works,” said Yu, who is from Sydney and living in Carbondale while at SIU. “It was good to see different techniques and experiments that were happening out there.”
Guifei (719-756) was known as one of the Four Beauties of the Tang dynasty, and her story has been told in many Chinese operas, poems and dramas. Headdresses were worn by women of rank in imperial China and traditionally indicated social status and power. For elite women, Yu said, “the headdress embodied authority but also fragility, reminding us that this privilege came with the constant threat of losing favor.
“The delicate designs on the ‘Crown of Glass’ shows the precarious balance between beauty and constraint, as if the wearer’s identity and value are bound to the object itself, evoking reverence but also a latent unease.”
Inspired by Tang dynasty beauty
Yu drew inspiration for the work from Chinese opera, particularly “Drunken Concubine,” which is centered on Yang Guifei, whose beauty is said to have contributed to the fall of the Tang dynasty.
The glass headdress was made using “flameworking methods with delicate borosilicate glass rods.”
The piece took a little over a month to make because “there are a lot of details attached to it,” Yu said, adding that flameworked clear glass is a material “that mirrors the fragility of identity and history.
“Hubris, the idea of chasing after dreams, desire and the illusory nature of it all has always fascinated me, because it is fulfilling and empty at the same time,” Yu said. “On one hand, it is what you believe you wanted all along, yet once you get it or a taste of it, you realize it may not have been what you envisioned all along, and while it is still beautiful, it’s also a little bittersweet.”
The headdress “represents that sense of desire, glory and emptiness of it all. When you wear it, it feels heavy not because it is physically so but because there’s a psychological weight due to fragility. I’m interested in the idea of invisible struggles and yearning.”
Yu, a Chinese-Australian artist, received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Sydney’s Sydney College of the Arts in Australia, and she expects to earn her MFA in spring 2026. She was attracted to SIU’s glass program because Jiyong Lee, a professor in the School of Art and Design “was teaching there and I had long admired his work even before I started working in glass.”
Lee said he’s excited by Yu’s artwork and her win. Yu has created “a series of sculptures that address various thoughts about her Chinese heritage, sense of displacement and loss of cultural identity,” Lee said. “She has created a few wearable sculptures that explore the concept of identity.”
One of many successful glass program students
Lee said that Yu is just the latest MFA student from SIU’s glass program to earn accolades at the conference. Hoseok Youn, a 2021 graduate, was selected as an emerging artist in GAS’ 2023 conference and demonstrated glassblowing this year. Youn is currently having a solo exhibition in St. Louis and completing several public and private collections. Eriko Kobayashi, a 2022 graduate, won top honors at the 2022 conference, and Sadhbh Mowlds, a 2022 MFA graduate, was selected an emerging artist at the 2024 conference in Berlin.
“We are proud of the success of our students and alumni from the glass program,” Lee said. “This success is a reflection of the hard work our students put into their practice and their willingness to take risks and grow. We create an environment that encourages curiosity, experimentation and mutual support. We’re a small program, but that gives us the opportunity to work closely with each student and really focus on their development — not just technically, but artistically and personally. It’s encouraging to see their efforts recognized beyond the studio.”