Artist Jiyong Lee does things with glass I didn’t think were possible. He joins pieces of glass of varying shades and degrees of translucency to represent cell division and the beginnings of life. I find his results absolutely fascinating and profoundly beautiful. Rather than blowing or firing the glass, he uses a process called cold working. This means he carves, cuts, sands, and laminates the glass chunks until they’ve formed a single, seamless piece. The resulting works are so perfect, so other-worldly, they look computer-generated, but he assures us that these are unretouched photographs of the pieces. They look so gloriously cool and smooth, I want to touch them.

His works are displayed at the Corning Glass Museum in Corning, New York. I haven’t been there in decades, but I remember it being wonderful, and now I’m certainly going to go back. Here he is in one of the museum’s videos talking about and illustrating his process: