Keeryong Choi

Keeryong Choi is a Korean-born glass artist whose sculptural vessels examine questions of cultural identity, memory and belonging shaped by more than two decades spent living between South Korea and Scotland.

Choi was born and raised in South Korea, where he completed his first degree in ceramics and metalsmithing in 1994. It was during his university years, at a time when only a handful of Korean institutions taught glass as an artistic medium, that one of his lecturers arranged a visit to a glass factory, giving Choi his first experience of working with hot glass. The encounter left a lasting impression, though it would be several years before he returned to the material in earnest. Regarding glass as a distinctly foreign, Western medium, Choi found himself drawn to its unfamiliar properties, and in 2006 he moved to Scotland to study it formally at Edinburgh College of Art, where he encountered the work of glass artists Alison McConachie and Dr Ray Flavell, then teaching at the college.

Following his Master of Design, Choi undertook a residency at Edinburgh College of Art before beginning a practice-led PhD in Glass and Architectural Glass at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, which he completed in December 2015. It was during this research that he developed the hand-inlaid colouring technique, drawn from the ancient Korean 'Sanggam' pottery method, that has remained central to his practice since. He has taught at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, since 2015, where he is Course Organiser for Digital Crafting and for Product Design: New Making and Fundamentals, and is a member of the RAFT Research Group.

Choi's early mature work, produced through the 2010s, combined hand-blown glass with found English porcelain teapots and ceramics, using tea, a material historically significant to both Korean and British culture, as a shared point of reference. Onto the glass, he inlaid geometric patterns and invented, meaningless Korean characters, a technique that let him explore the ambiguity of cultural reading directly on the object's surface. In parallel, he produced a body of work drawing on the tattoo imagery of Latin American gang members in the United States, using its coded visual language to raise questions about immigration and stereotyping.

From around 2018, this research developed into the ongoing Daam Dah series, for which Choi generates forms digitally before realising them through 3D printing and lost-wax casting in glass. Central to the series is his practice of hand-inlaying 23.5-carat gold leaf into the surface bubbles produced during kiln firing, bubbles conventionally regarded within glassmaking as a technical flaw. This body of work marks a shift from the earlier combination of glass with found ceramics towards vessel forms realised in glass alone, and, more recently, towards paired vessels of increasing scale.

Choi's work has been exhibited internationally, including at SOFA Chicago, the International Glass Prize in Belgium, Collect in London, the Toyama Glass Art Museum in Japan and the Coburg Prize for Contemporary Glass in Germany, and was selected as a finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2023. He received the National Glass Centre's Emerging Artist Residency Award at the British Glass Biennale in 2015. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Corning Museum of Glass and the Imagine Museum in the United States, the National Museum of Scotland, the City of Edinburgh Council, the Oriental Museum at Durham University, and the National Glass Centre in Sunderland.