What looks to be a bamboo basket is really a construction of iron and copper wires. An exquisite metalsmith, Woosun Cheon creates nonfunctional vessels of various types through a labor-intensive welding process.

In building a work like this one, Cheon starts with a foot and a rim. He connects the two pieces with iron spines and then fills the spaces in between with a mix of copper and iron wires. The two-tone colors of the body come from a complicated method that, among other techniques, includes boiling the entire vessel in strong, dark tea.