Arts Thread

After-School Still Life revisits the repetitive structure of extracurricular art training in China, where still life subjects such as apples, bottles, and plaster busts functioned as symbols of discipline and conformity. Dou reinterprets these familiar forms through kiln-formed glass, layering texture and visual depth by manipulating thickness and transparency. Rather than painting or printing directly onto the surface, she allows patterns and colors to emerge from within the glass, creating images that appear suspended in space. This body of work explores the relationship between rigid educational systems and the expressive potential of glass. Dou integrates metal wire into the composition to form playful, irregular contours that echo hand-drawn lines, introducing both formal and whimsical qualities. Her practice combines precision with unpredictability, producing textures that range from rough and fragmented to fluid and luminous. Through this process, she challenges conventional perceptions of glass as cold and static, using the material as a medium to reflect on vulnerability, transformation, and resilience, as well as the complex relationship between memory, fear, and the act of learning.

Bad Blood questions family identity and blood ties. In China, home and family are often blurred, but for me this home means horror and hidden pain. Using pâte de verre, I create thin, fragile glass sheets—fuzzy, hole-filled, like my memories. By varying temperatures, grains, and adding materials, I evoke impressions of softness, burning, or stitched scars. Needles and threads pierce holes, violent yet binding, representing blood ties. Ceramic pigments form blurred patterns of the five poisons: toad, centipede, scorpion, gecko, snake — symbols of toxic, alienated kinship. I reveal trauma with playful, sarcastic resistance.