In Yuhe Luo’s recent work, glass is rarely allowed to remain stable. It flows, hardens, fractures and is reconstructed, carrying with it the physical traces of each transformation. These changing states have become increasingly important to Luo’s exploration of bodily experience, time and memory, allowing the behaviour of the material itself to participate in the meaning of the work.

Luo studied Textile Design at the Royal College of Art after completing her undergraduate degree at Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice spans glass, fibre, metal, biomaterials and digital fabrication, but her recent work with glass brings a particular tension between control and unpredictability. Rather than treating the material as a passive surface onto which meaning is placed, Luo works with its transparency, fluidity, rigidity and susceptibility to fracture.

Memory Remains (2026) brings this approach into particularly clear focus. Developed from Luo’s reflections on memory and the passage of time, the work approaches memory not as a stable record of the past, but as something that persists while continually changing. Experiences remain, yet details shift, emotions accumulate, and parts are gradually worn away or forgotten.

To give this instability physical form, Luo combines coloured glass materials with different melting points. During firing, they respond unevenly to heat. Cracks emerge, sections fracture, and unpredictable textures develop across the surface. These changes are not treated as defects to be concealed. Luo gathers the broken sections and reassembles them, allowing the work to take shape through a cycle of destruction and reconstruction.

What makes Memory Remains convincing is that fracture is not introduced afterwards as a metaphor for loss. It is produced by the same material process through which the work comes into being. The glass does not simply illustrate the instability of memory; it undergoes instability itself.

There is an obvious temptation to read broken glass symbolically, as an image of something damaged or lost. Luo’s work becomes more interesting when fracture is understood instead as a working condition. Once the material has broken, the original configuration cannot simply be recovered. What follows is another act of construction, one determined by what has survived and by the new relationships that can be formed between fragments.

Memory operates in a similar way within the work. It does not return experience unchanged but reorganises what remains.

The floral elements introduce a quieter transformation. Made with recycled red glass, they respond differently during firing according to the proportion of material Luo uses. Some areas remain relatively transparent while others develop a stronger red. Across the work, these variations create a gradual movement between different states, suggesting memories moving from intensity towards disappearance. The flowers evoke the blooming and fading of memory without reducing the work to a simple illustration of remembering and forgetting.

Instead, the surface reads as a fragment temporarily held in place. Transparency, colour, cracks and reconstructed edges coexist without resolving into a seamless whole. The work preserves evidence of change rather than attempting to reverse it.

This interest in the changing states of glass can also be seen in Luo’s earlier work 嫚 / m�n (2025), although here the material is rooted in a markedly different experience.

In 嫚 / m�n, Luo turns to menstruation and the temporal experience of the female body. For Luo, menstrual blood carries both associations with fertility and the realities of pain and interruption, producing a cyclical, pulse-like experience of time. The work makes visible a physiological phenomenon that is frequently expected to remain private or concealed, challenging social expectations around the female body as something that should remain clean, controlled and hidden.

Glass, copper wire and cotton thread establish different forms of tension around this experience. The flowing shapes of glass recall the movement and pulse of blood, yet the material has already cooled and become solid. Something associated with bodily flow is therefore held in a suspended state between movement and stillness.

Transparency complicates this relationship further. The glass exposes rather than hides. An intimate physiological experience becomes available to view, placing private bodily experience under an external gaze.

Copper wire defines the boundaries of this movement, but its flexibility and malleability prevent those boundaries from appearing entirely fixed. It suggests the shifting tension between the body’s own rhythms and the social expectations imposed upon it. Red yarn extends beyond the frame, becoming an overflow of that rhythm and a continuing resistance to containment.

The work is strongest where these materials are allowed to remain contradictory. Fluidity and stillness, flexibility and restriction, softness and strength coexist within the same structure. Rather than representing menstruation figuratively, Luo gives its bodily and temporal contradictions a material presence.

Seen together, 嫚 / m�n and Memory Remains reveal a significant shift in Luo’s relationship with glass.

In 嫚 / m�n, glass gives permanence to something defined by flow. A bodily process associated with movement, repetition and pulse is temporarily fixed in material form. In Memory Remains, Luo reverses this relationship. Glass—a material that can appear solid and enduring—is allowed to fracture, shift and resist stability.

The comparison is revealing because the two works do not simply repeat the same material language. Luo changes the role that glass is asked to perform.

If 嫚 / m�n considers how time is experienced through the body—as recurrence, interruption and pulse—Memory Remains asks what time does to experience once it has become memory. The first is structured around return; the second around alteration. Something remains in both, but never in precisely the same condition.

Glass is capable of holding these different ideas because its contradictions are physical rather than merely symbolic. It can move and then become fixed. It can appear permanent and then fracture. It can reveal what lies behind it while altering the way that thing is seen. Luo’s recent work is most persuasive when it does not attempt to resolve these qualities but allows them to remain active within the object.

Her textile background remains visible in the attention she gives to connection and reconstruction, but glass introduces a different kind of uncertainty through heat, incompatibility and fracture. The finished work therefore records not only the artist’s decisions but also moments in which the material responds beyond complete control.

This negotiation between intention and unpredictability gives Luo’s glass practice much of its character. Material is not simply asked to obey an image conceived in advance. Its behaviour can interrupt the process, and that interruption can redirect the work.

Memory Remains, presented in Threshold at D Contemporary Gallery and Whiteshepherd Gallery in London, brings this approach into particularly clear focus. The work does not present memory as something that can be protected from change. Instead, preservation and transformation become inseparable: to keep something is also to encounter the ways in which it has already changed.

This is ultimately what connects Memory Remains to 嫚 / m�n without collapsing the two works into the same subject. One begins with the cyclical time of the body; the other with the unstable duration of memory. Between them, glass shifts from holding movement still to making change itself visible.

Luo’s use of the material is compelling precisely because fragility is not treated as an endpoint. A crack does not simply signal destruction, just as transparency does not guarantee clarity. Each condition opens another relationship between material and experience.

In Memory Remains, the reconstructed surface never returns to what it was before firing. The fractures remain visible, recording the material’s passage through heat, breakage and reconstruction. What survives is neither the original object nor an attempt to imitate it.

It is a new structure made from what remains.