SINGAPORE – Celebrated Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson opens his first major solo exhibition in South-east Asia at the Singapore Art Museum on May 10, featuring 17 mostly large-scale works that derive joy from the environment and play with his trademark subjectivity of perception.

The artist, 57, has throughout his three decades of practice found endless inspiration in experiential spaces and the elemental components of light, water and air.

For those worried about social media posts and learning too much before the exhibition, the artist says: “People have access to knowledge that is beneficial to have when they see the work. They become more sensitised because they come to the exhibition more prepared.”

Here are five works to catch at Olafur Eliasson: Your Curious Journey that runs till September 22.

1. Symbiotic Seeing (2020)

This work, created with precisely tweaked laser lights and fog that is periodically released, takes up the entire gallery on the third floor of the building.

Visitors enter the space and look up to find a ceiling that ripples with swirls and eddies, like a cloud-filled sky going through accelerated changes in weather.

As the work’s title suggests, Eliasson takes the experience of communal viewing into account: Now and then, a section becomes brighter, and people inevitably gravitate towards that part of the room.

Symbiotic Seeing will be shown only in Singapore and will not travel to New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan with the rest of the exhibition.

2. Object Defined By Activity (Then) (2009)

A water feature in a pitch-black room is given the strobe light treatment, illuminated in short bursts before the viewer’s eyes.

In the process, it transits from liquid to solid form, appearing as a quick succession of rapidly evolving, stop-motion sculpture.

The other iconic work staged in a dark room to catch is Beauty (1993), where a rainbow is created by training a spotlight on a sheet of mist. The running water makes it shimmer, with the prism of colour also altering with the visitor’s movement around the room.

3. Ventilator (1997)

The most kinetic work is a lone electric fan hanging from the ceiling, buffeted by the air currents it creates.

Through it, Eliasson makes the invisible elements of wind and air visible.

Visitors will find themselves mesmerised by the fan’s erratic movement and surely feel a jolt of danger as they are forced to walk beneath it to enter the next gallery.

4. Moss Wall (1994)

Eliasson draws inspiration from his native Iceland to create Moss Wall, a huge vertical carpet made of reindeer cup lichen that covers an entire gallery wall.

Known colloquially as reindeer moss, the coral-like lichen is found primarily in the alpine tundra and is an important food for reindeer.

The artist brings a field of it into the white gallery space, collapsing the boundaries between nature and man-made, as well as interior and exterior.

In exhibitions of this work elsewhere, visitors are allowed to touch the living, breathing wall. Singapore visitors can experience it through only the senses of sight and smell, though.

5.The Cubic Structural Evolution Project (2004)

A recognisable Eliasson feature when his exhibition travels, The Cubic Structural Evolution Project is a pile of Lego bricks that awaits their transformation into a fantastical cityscape.

In the spirit of co-creation, the artist wants visitors to sit down and build their own imaginative skyscrapers or complexes, rediscovering their sense of free play and wonder.

Buildings can be constructed or torn down according to the whims of those seated around the table; it is a work with no final form.