JAMES TURRELL

For over five decades, Turrell has pushed the limits of perception through a practice centered on light as his primary material. Beginning in the 1960s with installations of projected and natural illumination in his studio in Santa Monica, California, his focus has been on the materiality of light and its ability to shape experience. The artist explains: “Generally, light is used to reveal something about the object. I use light as the revelation itself.” In the context of Hong Kong, a city defined by density, verticality, and luminous intensity, Turrell’s work invites a recalibration of perception, proposing light not as spectacle, but as a contemplative and durational encounter.

Lifting the Veil features three Glassworks—Resolute (2025), Patmos (2024), and Of One Mind (2024)— each in a chamber constructed within the gallery for this exhibition. Initiated in 2001, each work in this series includes computer-controlled LED lights installed behind a shaped aperture in the wall—ellipse, diamond, and rectangle, respectively. Slowly changing fields of color pulse between the works’ centers and their edges, at times resolving into single hues. Producing alternating impressions of depth and flatness, the Glassworks cast light outward, transforming their spaces through illumination. Installed as a sequence, these works unfold as perceptual environments, guiding viewers through a calibrated progression of sensory awareness.

First introduced four decades ago, Turrell’s holograms reflect and transmit light to create the illusion of tangible forms. These works vary in the apparent color, position, and depth of their ephemeral shapes, which appear to float in front of or behind the picture plane. Their immaterial presence resonates with long-standing philosophical and aesthetic traditions in Asia that privilege emptiness, atmosphere, and the threshold between presence and absence. Accompanying them are prints related to Aten Reign (2013), a temporary site-specific installation that was the core of an exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that attracted nearly half a million visitors, making it the city’s most attended that year.

In emphasizing both finished works and preparatory structures, Lifting the Veil functions as a survey not through chronology alone, but through states of perception—charting how light, space, and consciousness converge across different formats and decades. Maquettes of the artist’s Skyspaces and site plans, photographs, and models created for Roden Crater are on view. The culmination of Turrell’s work, Roden Crater is a naked-eye observatory for the contemplation of light, time, and landscape. Fundraising is underway to complete its construction and open it to the public.

As Seen Below (2026) opens at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, on June 19, 2026. Measuring over 130 feet (40 meters) in diameter and over 50 feet (16 meters) high, this massive permanent installation is the largest Skyspace in a museum context, which Turrell describes as his most ambitious to date.