Lee is a faculty member with the School of Education’s Art Department, where she heads the university’s highly regarded Glass Lab.

The report begins: “In a balmy lab on the campus of UW–Madison, a number of students are finishing up their art projects for the semester. One opens up a sliding door to a furnace heated to over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the other uses a long pole to gather up some of the molten liquid inside. When exposed to the air, the viscous fluid quickly forms into a malleable solid shape.”

“Glass has this really alien behavior,” muses Lee. “How do you interact with something that’s changing its behavior as you work with it? It’s just really captivating to me.”

The report explains how Lee’s glass artwork has been exhibited across the globe and how growing up bilingual, much of her work explores language.

“My grandmother raised me and she only spoke Chinese,” she says. “I had to negotiate between the English-speaking world and the Chinese-speaking world. I’ve always been fluidly moving between them. So in my experience, language isn’t this fixed entity.”

The report continues: “Glass is perhaps the perfect medium for Lee to express her ideas. And she gets great satisfaction from sharing the very physical craft of glass-working with students.”

Make sure and check out the entire report, including an outstanding video, on this WisconsinLife.org web page.

Wisconsin Life is co-produced by Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television.