At 15, a boy walked into an exhibition by Thomas Wilfred and encountered something that would quietly alter the course of contemporary art.
The works did not merely occupy space—they transformed it with light itself. For the young James Turrell, it was less an exhibition than a revelation.
By 16, he had already earned a pilot’s licence, an astonishing accomplishment for someone his age, taking to the skies long before most teenagers had learnt to drive.
Aviation became another classroom. The endless horizon, shifting atmosphere and infinite gradations of daylight would later become as vital to his artistic language as pigment is to a painter.
During that period, he also flew missions transporting Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet, experiences that further shaped his lifelong fascination with transcendence, perception and silence.
Then came 1966.
Inside his Santa Monica studio at the Mendota Hotel, as Los Angeles’ revolutionary Light and Space movement gathered momentum through artists including Robert Irwin, Mary Corse and Doug Wheeler, Turrell blacked out his windows, allowing only carefully measured shafts of street light to enter.
Those modest interventions became his first projected light works, marking the beginning of a career that would spend the next five decades asking one deceptively simple question: what if light itself became the artwork?
Today, that question arrives in Hong Kong with remarkable clarity.
Inside the storied Pedder Building, Gagosian presents Lifting the Veil, an exhibition that feels less like a conventional survey than an invitation to recalibrate human perception. Visitors do not simply look at Turrell’s works. They surrender to them.
In a city celebrated for its vertical skyline and relentless luminosity, his meditative environments replace spectacle with stillness, proving that light can whisper with greater authority than architecture can shout.
The exhibition charts the remarkable breadth of Turrell’s practice through holograms, prints, architectural plans, photographs and models of his celebrated Skyspaces, alongside studies for his lifelong magnum opus, Roden Crater. Since 1977, the extinct volcanic cinder cone in Arizona’s Painted Desert has evolved into perhaps the world’s most ambitious naked-eye observatory, transforming geology itself into an instrument for contemplating light, time and the cosmos.
Yet the emotional centre of Lifting the Veil belongs to three extraordinary Glassworks.
Installed within purpose-built chambers, Resolute (2025), Patmos (2024) and Of One Mind (2024) demonstrate why Turrell remains unrivalled in orchestrating perception.
Hidden LED systems pulse behind elliptical, diamond and rectangular apertures, releasing impossibly soft waves of colour that appear to breathe. Surfaces collapse into depth before flattening once more.
Colour dissolves into atmosphere. Architecture evaporates into sensation. The viewer leaves uncertain whether they have been observing light—or whether light has been quietly observing them all along.
It is an astonishing reminder that Turrell has never been interested in illusion for its own sake. His ambition has always been profoundly philosophical.
“Generally, light is used to reveal something about the object. I use light as the revelation itself.”
The statement has become one of contemporary art’s defining manifestos, and nowhere does it resonate more powerfully than here.
His holograms continue that enquiry with breathtaking elegance. First introduced more than four decades ago, they conjure seemingly tangible forms suspended weightlessly before and behind their surfaces.
They hover between presence and absence, permanence and disappearance, recalling Eastern philosophical ideas surrounding emptiness and impermanence while refusing to settle into either certainty or illusion.
Elsewhere, prints connected to Aten Reign—his monumental 2013 intervention at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—recall the installation that captivated nearly half a million visitors, while Skyspace models and Roden Crater studies reveal the meticulous architectural thinking behind works that have fundamentally reshaped environmental art.
Few living artists have altered how humanity experiences seeing itself as profoundly as James Turrell. He has never painted landscapes, yet he has transformed the sky into his canvas.
He has never sculpted marble, yet he has carved monuments from atmosphere. His medium has always been the invisible, made unforgettable.
As Lifting the Veil continues its Hong Kong run before concluding in August, it offers something increasingly rare in contemporary culture: an opportunity not merely to consume art, but to experience genuine wonder. For collectors, students and seasoned connoisseurs alike, this is not simply one of the year’s essential exhibitions.
It is a reminder that the greatest masterpieces do not always ask us to look harder.
Sometimes, they simply teach us how to see.
For more details on the exhibition, visit https://gagosian.com/ today.
*Photos courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
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