There’s a specific illusion at AP Space’s last exhibit, South Korean artist Yoo Choong Mok’s solo exhibition, Tracing Light. It filled the Chelsea gallery with canvases that appear, at first glance, to be dripping. They aren’t. Every droplet is glass, individually hand-formed and fused onto raw canvas and wood, and the illusion holds up at close range in a way that most trompe l’oeil work doesn’t.
A Practice Built Around One Object
Yoo has spent years refining a single recurring form: a hyper-realistic glass droplet, shaped using high-temperature glassworking, then composed across deep, saturated canvases in plum, moss, and blue. What makes the work function as more than a technical trick is the surface underneath it. The canvas stays rough, fibrous, almost unfinished, while the glass sits on top of it glossy and precise. That tension between the two materials is where most of the show’s energy lives, and it’s more visible up close than in any photo of the work.
Yoo’s droplets also do something photographs can’t fully capture: they respond to the room. As natural light moves through AP Space over the course of a day, each piece shifts in tone and reflection, never quite settling into one fixed version of itself. Yoo has cited Dan-cheong, the traditional Korean architectural coloring found on temples and palaces, as a reference point, and that idea of color built to interact with shifting light rather than sit static on a surface carries through the entire show.
Time, Compressed Into a Single Drop
The concept behind Tracing Light is more philosophical than the visual might suggest at first. Yoo has described a single water droplet as something that holds an entire continuum of time inside it, the weight of memory and heritage on one side, the immediate, constantly changing present on the other. It’s a big idea to hang on something as small as a droplet, but the show largely earns it. There’s a stillness to the room that asks visitors to slow down rather than move through it quickly, which is a rarer request from a gallery show than it should be.
About the Artist
Yoo Choong Mok approaches glass as a painterly medium rather than a purely sculptural one. His work is held in private and institutional collections across Asia, Europe, and the United States, and this exhibition marks a notable point of contact between his practice and the New York gallery scene.
