Park Han-sol reports on Korea's financial regulators, along with fintech and insurance. She previously wrote about the art world, from biennales and exhibitions to fairs and auctions, with a focus on Seoul and the figures shaping the scene. Before joining The Korea Times, she spent a year at ABC News' Seoul bureau, contributing to coverage of major Asia-Pacific events.
INTERVIEW In Seoul, James Turrell lets the light in
Artist James Turrell at Pace Gallery Seoul / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
By Park Han-sol
82-year-old ‘master of light’ rekindles his connection to Korea
Entering a James Turrell installation is like stepping into a dream that forgot it had walls, where neon colors flood the air and horizons dissolve. It asks something of you: a momentary submission, a willingness to forget where your body ends and the light begins.
In Turrell’s world, light isn’t a vehicle for revelation — it is the revelation.
“We use light to illuminate other things, but I’m interested in the thingness of light itself,” the 82-year-old said, repeating his long-held mantra on a busy Tuesday afternoon at Pace Gallery Seoul, where he and his team were making last-minute adjustments for “The Return,” his first solo exhibition in Korea in 17 years.
The gallery show is admittedly modest in scale compared to what the artist has pursued for nearly six decades. After all, this is the man who once transformed the Guggenheim’s entire rotunda into a glowing chamber of shifting color, and who has spent half his life carving Roden Crater — an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert — into his magnum opus: a naked-eye observatory and sensory labyrinth.
In Korea, five of his monumental installations — including “Skyspace,” which, in Turrell’s words, “brings the heavens into the space where you are” — occupy Museum SAN in the mountains of Gangwon Province.
But the Seoul show still manages to be a rare treat, especially as an intimate overview of the artist’s lifelong practice.
On view are several of his luminous pieces from the “Glassworks” series, each in distinct geometric shapes, alongside aerial photographs and architectural blueprints of the Roden Crater project.
The real highlight, however, is “Wedgework,” created specifically for this exhibition. For the piece, the gallery’s entire third floor is submerged in utter darkness. Within it, vast crimson and green rectangles seem to hover in space, suspended without any visible horizon to anchor them. Every contour is sculpted entirely from light, conjuring the uncanny illusion of solid walls where none exist.
James Turrell's "Longing, Wide Elliptical Curved Glass" (2021) / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
When Turrell speaks about light, he does so with the soft cadence of a devoted practitioner, his signature white beard lending him the air of a philosopher in thought.
For him, light is the natural convergence point of the many threads in his life. Raised in the Quaker tradition, he was shaped by its core belief in the “inner light” within each person. As a licensed pilot, he spent long hours in high-altitude sky, attuned to the subtle shifts of radiance and atmosphere. And as a student of astronomy, psychology and mathematics, he came to understand that we can read the makeup of a distant star through the light it releases.
“The biggest thing about light is that we have a full relationship to it,” he told The Korea Times without a moment’s hesitation, as if the thought had lived in him so long it no longer needed conscious summoning.
Physically, we humans are, as he puts it, “light-eaters.” We “drink” it through the skin to produce vitamin D, nourishing not only our bodies but the chemical balances of our minds. We also have emotional responses to colors, despite each hue simply being a different wavelength of light.
But it is the spiritual response, he insists, that runs deepest. “In a lucid dream, where does the light come from? We close our eyes, and sometimes, we see with more clarity than we do in daylight,” he said.
“And every time people talk about a near-death experience or a religious moment, they describe it using the vocabulary of light. ‘Enlightenment,’ for instance.”
His fascination lies in our strong encounter with this primal, transcendent force — a relationship he likens to a deer caught in headlights, frozen as if entering a trance.
While art history is filled with those who sought to capture or depict light — Vermeer, Turner, Goya, Velazquez, Titian, Caravaggio and the Impressionists — Turrell does something else.
He doesn’t paint it. He makes it the very substance of space itself: the boundless expanse you drift into and lose yourself in, the presence you feel with your whole body.
The artist’s installations can be disorienting, especially for first-time visitors — a bit of bumping into things is not uncommon. They ask you to let go of grounded reality, to surrender the usual coordinates of sense and space. The horizonless disequilibrium he so often conjures is intentional, designed to loosen your grip on the familiar ways we perceive the world.
But once you yield to it, the experience becomes entrancing, meditative. “I come from this Quaker tradition of meditation,” he said. “It reminds me of Ham Seok-heon here, who was a famous Korean Quaker.”
It’s a sensation that is difficult to put into words, something Turrell himself readily acknowledges.
“When you try to describe the work of mine to somebody else, it’s something like, ‘Well, there’s this light. It kind of exists in this odd space,’” he said with a smile.
He wants his work to speak beyond the constraints of language because, as he sees it, words often obscure more than they reveal. The same goes for the technology behind it. One doesn’t need to know how it works. All they really have to do is show up and sit down, as his installations are almost always accompanied by benches or mats.
“I probably have some of the most technologically involved art there is, in terms of manipulating the subtleties of how color changes and how I work in depth. But I don’t want to be seen that way. When you look at this, I don’t want you to feel like you’re looking at technology,” the artist said.
Still, it took years before the world caught up to what he was doing. “It was a long time before I could actually make a living selling colored air or blue sky. And collectors would ask me, ‘What is it that I own?’ And I say, ‘Well, you own the light that’s passing through.’”
The title of Turrell’s Seoul exhibition, “The Return,” gestures toward a kind of homecoming.
He first came to Korea in 1961 while serving as a conscientious objector before the escalation of the Vietnam War, flying Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet.
During one such mission, his plane was shot down and he was taken to an American military hospital in Seoul. What he remembers most is the piercing cold of that winter.
“My face was pretty smashed, so they had to reconstruct it. I was one of the first to have Korean cosmetic surgery,” he said with a chuckle. “But they made me look just like I did before. I mean, there was no improvement!”
Years later, he would return again — this time by choice — after meeting his now-wife, artist Lee Kyung-lim. Since then, his luminous works have quietly taken root across Korea, surfacing both in the heart of the metropolis and in the stillness of nature.
And now, another light has arrived.
“The Return” opens on Saturday and runs through Sept. 27 at Pace Gallery Seoul.