Summary
- Gagosian Hong Kong opens “James Turrell: Lifting the Veil” on May 28, a survey exhibition spanning holograms, prints, three new Glasswork pieces, and documentation of the artist’s Skyspaces and Roden Crater project
- The exhibition marks a rare opportunity to encounter Turrell’s practice in Asia, where his philosophical alignment with traditions of emptiness, atmosphere, and perceptual threshold carries particular cultural resonance
- Lifting the Veil runs through August 1 at the Pedder Building in Central
James Turrell has spent more than five decades treating light not as a tool but as the thing itself, and on May 28, Gagosian Hong Kong opens “Lifting the Veil,” a survey exhibition that brings together holograms, prints, three Glasswork pieces, and documentary material from the artist’s Skyspace and Roden Crater projects. For a city that operates at the scale and luminous intensity of Hong Kong, the timing and location feel less like coincidence and more like an argument.
To understand why a Turrell exhibition in Hong Kong carries particular weight, it helps to start with what Turrell actually does, and what he has been doing since the 1960s. Working initially from a studio in Santa Monica, he began with projections and natural light, progressively developing a practice in which the material is the light itself rather than anything it might illuminate. His own articulation of this is direct: “Generally, light is used to reveal something about the object. I use light as the revelation itself.” Over five decades, that premise has produced one of the most consistently rigorous bodies of work in contemporary art, from the intimate scale of his early projection pieces to the geological ambition of Roden Crater.
Roden Crater remains the reference point against which everything else in Turrell’s practice is measured. Under construction since 1977 in the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona, it is a naked-eye observatory built inside a volcanic cinder cone, designed for the contemplation of light, time, and landscape at a scale that has no real precedent in art history. The exhibition includes site plans, photographs, and models created for the project, offering Hong Kong audiences a rare material encounter with a work that most people will never experience in person. Fundraising to complete and open the crater to the public is ongoing, which gives these documentary works a particular urgency: they are records of something still becoming.
The three Glassworks on view — Resolute (2025), Patmos (2024), and Of One Mind (2024) — are each installed in dedicated chambers constructed within the gallery. Initiated in 2001, the series uses computer-controlled LED lights behind shaped apertures, an ellipse, a diamond, and a rectangle respectively, to produce slowly shifting fields of color that pulse between center and edge, alternating between impressions of depth and flatness. Installed in sequence, they function as a calibrated progression rather than three separate encounters, guiding the viewer through increasingly refined states of perceptual awareness. They are among Turrell’s most accessible works in the sense that they require nothing from the viewer except attention and time.
The holograms, first introduced four decades ago, operate differently. They reflect and transmit light to produce ephemeral forms that appear to float either in front of or behind the picture plane, their apparent color, position, and depth shifting as the viewer moves. In the context of Hong Kong, a city with deep roots in philosophical and aesthetic traditions that privilege emptiness and the threshold between presence and absence, these works carry a resonance that extends well beyond their technical construction. Accompanying them are prints related to Aten Reign, the 2013 site-specific installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that attracted nearly half a million visitors and became the most attended exhibition in New York that year. The Guggenheim moment established Turrell as something beyond a niche perceptual artist; it confirmed him as a figure capable of stopping a general public in its tracks.
That capacity is what makes Lifting the Veil more than a gallery exhibition for committed art viewers. Turrell’s Skyspaces — architectural chambers with ceiling apertures open to the sky — have been installed in locations ranging from Scotland to Japan, and their effect on visitors with no prior knowledge of his practice is well documented. The models and site plans included in the Hong Kong exhibition give those works a new context, showing the thinking and construction logic behind spaces designed to make the sky feel like an object you could almost touch. For a city built on verticality and defined by its relationship to the sky above, that proposition is not abstract.
“James Turrell: Lifting the Veil” opens May 28 at Gagosian Hong Kong.
Gagosian Hong Kong
7/F Pedder Building,
12 Pedder Street, Central