The Beauty Within the Glass

Dale Chihuly and Loretta Hui-shan Yang are two artists with Hollywood-sized personas.

Critics have likened Chihuly, Seattle’s superstar of glass sculpture, to an improvisational movie director, coaching his crew as it blows his oddly surreal shapes.

And Yang, Taiwan’s modern glass master, is a former movie star.

Starting today you can see their often cinematic illusions in glass, along with ancient Roman vessels, at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art’s shimmering, three-pronged show “Trilogy of Glasswork: Ancient Rome--Chihuly--Yang.”

The Roman glassware and Yang’s mystical Buddha sculptures are on view through June 4. Chihuly’s splashy “Seaforms” are on view through May 20.

Of course, the Bowers isn’t the only museum high on glass these days. Howard Ben Tre’s monolithic cast-glass sculptures are on display at the Orange County Museum of Art through May 6 (see accompanying story). The lure of the fluid, translucent medium is easy to understand.

“It breaks,” Yang, 48, said in a recent interview at the Bowers. She laughed gently, remembering her mishaps with glass sculpture about 12 years ago when she first attempted the French pate-de-verre, or lost-wax casting process that is now her trademark.

“Trilogy of Glasswork” features more than 200 fragile Roman glass vessels made from the late 2nd century BC to the early 7th century AD. Called “Roman Glass: Reflections of Cultural Change,” this portion of the exhibition was organized by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

It aims to take ancient glassware out of its high-art niche, placing it in a domestic and cultural context.

“Dale Chihuly: Seaforms” includes 20 hotly-colored, rippled and striated blown-glass sculptures resembling exotic shells and blossoms, plus 10 related drawings.

The third arm of the exhibit, “Loretta Yang: Formless, but Not Without Form,” showcases Yang’s tabletop sculptures, most of which enclose clear glass figures of Buddha inside larger glass blocks filled with bubbles, as if they were encased in ice or small movie screens or television sets.

While Yang’s quieter pieces embody the mindfulness and purity of Buddha, Chihuly’s work swirls and seethes with pop culture bravado.

Chihuly’s fame in the world of glass recently led to ambitious, outdoor, site-specific exhibitions in Venice and Jerusalem that drew international acclaim.

After sustaining eye and shoulder injuries, Chihuly can no longer blow glass. Instead he makes large sketches, flinging paint about a la Jackson Pollock. Then he directs assistants as they work the molten material.

“I’m quite prolific,” he said. “Everything I do is done quickly, and that’s also the nature of glass blowing. The nature of the material--[it] likes to bend fast. It’s got to move.”

For Yang, glass sculpting came after a successful film career. An award-winning actress in Taiwan, she starred in about 125 movies by the time she stepped away from the camera in 1987. She made her last three films for director Yi Chang, including the famous “Jade Love” (1982).

At the time, local media linked Yang and Chang romantically, causing an uproar because Chang was married, Yang said. They could no longer work together because of the publicity. The flak finally faded, but they decided to leave the film industry together to set up a glass studio, inspired by the many beautiful crystal pieces on the set of one of the movies they made.

“Crazy, yes,” said Chang, who now is married to Yang and accompanied her at the Bowers.

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Chang and Yang founded their liuligongfang (glass workshop) in Taiwan in 1989. Initially they spent three years and $2.5 million trying to work in pate-de-verre.

“We burned the money,” Yang said, only half-teasing. If temperatures get too high, her lost wax sculptures melt, she said. “You can always cause damage, even in polishing. The glass is pretty heavy.”

Yang persevered--”self-education,” she said--and mastered the process.

Now a decade later, she is considered a pioneer of modern Chinese glass.

She has exhibited her work at the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai Fine Arts Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and many other venues. She and Chang also operate a glass-casting workshop in Shanghai.

It takes Yang several months to make a Buddha sculpture. She has made 25 in four years. Given the difficult process and high casualty rate, it’s a wonder she hasn’t returned to the seemingly simpler and more lucrative days of movie-making.

Yang smiled. “We just don’t have the patience for the movies anymore,” she said.

SHOW TIMES

“Trilogy of Glasswork: Ancient Rome--Chihuly--Yang,” Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Opens today. Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. $8 to $10; $6 children 5-12; children under 5 admitted free. Two parts of the exhibit, “Roman Glass: Reflections of Cultural Change” and “Loretta Yang: Formless, but Not Without Form,” are on view through June 4. “Dale Chihuly: Seaforms” is on view through May 20.