In response to James Turrell's Bridget's Bardo (2009)
By Henie Zhang
When I am Bridget
So Bridget is heavenly
I know Bridget when she is so heavenly
Huge ho-hum violet heaven
Violets in a violet lemon field
Look at your tulips, Bridget
They are as indifferent as my tulips
I am a fabulous insect
My mouth is an unhinged jewel
glut. Bridget lit it up,
violet fire. To be in Bridget I light up
inside Bridget's love. I want
Bridget's love, chippable, blown up
on my heart,
when I am, the fruit,
existing, inside of it,
wanting its colors,
to turn
To Turn
turn to catching it to shreds I wear it
in shreds I wear her, inside, when I am
/When she & I /
are in Love
together!
I am dementedly happy,
It is true
Bridget casts a small, sticky aura
When the light falls directly on Bridget Bridget dies
& I can no longer be loved by Bridget
When Bridget recounts for me her dreams about my dreams
Bridget thinks, "two objects vibrating against each other makes stickiness"
Says, "violet sullenness rushes bottom reason in gilded country"
I imagine Bridget as a nothing-colored violet
Singing about Bridget
Clapping her hands
Trying to find the point at which I become Bridget & wept there almost thinking almost becoming alive & wept there into the resplendent heaven of Bridget who looms finite & inert & true
My Dreams:
Am I walking in or out of Bridget?
Am I getting SICK by being Bridget?
Will I break up by shutting Bridget down?
If Bridget is me, what am I by breaking Bridget?
When Bridget weeps her tears are rhinestone ice
Bridget cries hot coals with her barefoot eyes
I put my pain inside Bridget's eyes
Bridget's Hair
Bridget's Feet
Sleet & Black Frost
in Bridge's false night
When Bridget wakes up what will happen to Bridget?
Bridget said
The pool looks pink so it can exist
oh Bridget
oh Bridget my ersatz rainbow
Tonight & all other nights
I drowned in your room & was buried
I died & was buried hilariously
I wanted to wake up a beautiful man
--
Note: "Violet sullenness rushes bottom reason in gilded country" is a riff on Jackson Mac Low's line "Coloring sullenness rushes bottom reason in gilded country," from his poem "Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair."
James Turrell’s The Return Transforms Perception at Pace Gallery
Seoul · June 14 – September 27, 2025
Where does the edge of space end and your perception begin?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
What if I could touch time? Turn light into matter?
Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.
What would we see if we could return to the beginning?
Before presence and absence, before light and darkness, before sound and silence?
In The Return, James Turrell does not simply present light as a medium; he stages an encounter with time, memory, and the instability of perception itself. Across three floors of Pace’s Seoul gallery, five new installations—including a never-before-seen site-specific Wedgework—offer visitors a sustained dialogue with the immaterial. These rooms do not ask what light reveals but what it conceals, what it holds in suspension, what it leaves behind.
Turrell’s practice has long been associated with “seeing yourself seeing,” but in this exhibition the act feels like a form of inward travel. Planes of projected light in the Wedgework press against the dark, creating thresholds where the body senses its own limits even as the space seems to expand beyond them. The curved, circular, and diamond-shaped glass installations shimmer with shifting hues, offering a kind of temporal vertigo—color as an unstable memory, depth as a question rather than an answer.
Works on paper punctuate the show like quiet footnotes. His new Wedgework prints map chromatic variation with the precision of someone tracing a remembered dream, while aquatints and woodcuts related to Aten Reign at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York echo the Roden Crater project’s ambition to anchor cosmic phenomena within the landscape of lived experience. These images do not illustrate the installations so much as they disclose another register of thought—drawing as a record of what cannot yet be built, or of what once was.
If the exhibition marks Turrell’s first solo show in Seoul since 2008, it also signals a return of a different sort: a looping back to earlier inquiries into light’s “thingness,” its capacity to be both material and immaterial, finite and infinite. Standing inside these works, one is reminded that perception is not passive reception but a form of authorship. Light becomes less a medium than a witness, implicating the viewer in its unfolding.
