Shanghai still thrills to James Turrell’s light fantastic show

The American artist uses light and holograph technology to create meditative installations that manipulate light and space, and his first retrospective is still wowing Shanghai after three months

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Reflection Holograms uses hologram technology to create three-dimensional shapes.

Published: 1:00pm, 26 Apr 2017Updated: 2:57pm, 27 Apr 2017

More than three months after James Turrell’s solo exhibition opened at the Long Museum in Shanghai, hundreds of visitors are still coughing up 200 yuan (HK$226) to see it.

“James Turrell: Immersive Light”, which runs until May 21, is billed as the Californian artist’s first comprehensive retrospective in mainland China and has divided the museum’s cavernous, industrial-inspired space up into 15 rooms, each housing an installation.

A visitor interacts with one of Turrell’s pieces. Photo: Casey Hall

For more than half a century, Turrell has been experimenting with the ways in which light and colour can be perceived by manipulating the relationship between light and space.

Walking into each installation, a familiar feeling descends. It’s almost like entering a holy place – a temple or church – where the air is cool and the mind settles easily into contemplation.

In a dark room, light projections of differing sizes and shapes can be seen on the walls, their colours – blue, green, purple and orange – gradually changing over a long period of time.

The first room of “Immersive Light” contains a 1976 piece entitled Ganzfeld, which is based on sensory deprivation experiments Turrell and his contemporaries conducted in the late 1960s.