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Exhibition Introduction

“Art Between Light, Space, and the Viewer”

Anthony McCall is a legendary figure in media art who has dissolved the boundaries between film, sculpture, and installation by using light and time as his sculptural language. His iconic Solid Light series is regarded as a pioneering form of immersive art that is completed through interaction with the viewer, and it has been spotlighted at major museums around the world. Most recently, his exhibition at Tate Modern in London was extended due to overwhelming acclaim, generating renewed global interest. Now, for the first time in Asia, Futura Seoul brings this extraordinary experience to new audiences. Join us and discover a moment of sensory restoration and emotional pause through the light-filled world of Anthony McCall.

“Between light and mist, forgotten senses awaken. Art that gradually stirs the soul.”

Dubbed a "sculptor of light," Anthony McCall holds a unique place in the contemporary art world for transcending the boundaries of cinema, sculpture, and installation. This exhibition—his first major presentation in Asia—offers a rare opportunity to experience over 50 years of artistic experimentation and innovation, from his early film works to his most recent digital projections. At its core are immersive installations that invite viewers to physically enter and explore spaces of light and haze. Through these works, audiences can engage with McCall’s multifaceted practice as a pioneer of media art and expanded cinema. Wander among the sculptural beams of light and experience a new spatial language shaped by time, movement, and presence.

Artist Introduction

“An Artist Who Arrived in the 21st Century Ahead of Time: Anthony McCall”

Born in 1946 in St. Paul’s Cray, UK, and currently based in Manhattan, New York, Anthony McCall is an artist whose work spans film, sculpture, installation, drawing, and performance. He has developed a singular visual language by shaping the immaterial concepts of light and time. He is best known for deconstructing cinematic structures and reimagining them through audience participation, coining the concept of Expanded Cinema, and for his immersive Solid Light series.

Since 1973, Solid Light works have taken on the form of three-dimensional light sculptures, projected through mist and evolving over time in space. These pieces invite viewers to step into and become part of the work itself, creating an intimate, bodily encounter with light. Long before the term "immersive art" became popularized, McCall was already pioneering experimental practices that drew audiences into the heart of the artwork through light and space.

His groundbreaking work has been recognized and exhibited by leading institutions around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001–2), Centre Georges Pompidou (2004), Tate Britain (2004), Serpentine Gallery (2007–8), MoMA in New York, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2024), and the ongoing exhibition at Tate Modern.

Futura Seoul presents the first monographic exhibition in Asia of Anthony McCall (b. 1946), a pioneering artist who has explored light, time, space, and audience interaction throughout his career. This exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of McCall’s artistic trajectory spanning nearly half a century. Beginning with his early film and performance works such as Landscape for Fire(1972), created in the UK, the exhibition traces the evolution of his practice. It highlights the pivotal moment in 1973 with Line Describing a Cone, which marked the inception of his renowned Solid Light series. The survey continues through to his more recent installations, which have become increasingly sophisticated since the 2000s through the integration of digital technology. Together, these works map McCall’s sustained experimentation and conceptual inquiry into the possibilities of light, space, and time as artistic materials. Featured works include Traveling Wave(1972/2013), Breath III(2011), Circulation Figures(1972/2011), Between You and I(2006), and Skylight(2020), all of which reveal how McCall’s visual language has evolved, exploring volumetric forms and sculptural qualities across decades.

Emerging in the early 1970s in dialogue with the New York avant-garde film scene, McCall began by examining the physical and temporal nature of film as a medium. After a two-decade hiatus from 1979 to the early 2000s, he returned with a body of work that combined digital technology with meticulously constructed light-based installations. McCall has redefined cinema through what he calls expanded cinema, integrating elements of sculpture, drawing, and installation. By removing the screen and projecting light into space, he invites audiences to step into three-dimensional environments shaped by light and time. These immersive works allow audiences to move through and around sculptural volumes of light, experiencing their form and transformation over time. Audience participation has always been central to McCall’s practice. In Landscape for Fire, he explored the boundary between material and image; in the Solid Light series, he sculpts light itself. As audiences physically engage with the space, their presence alters and completes the work, generating a dynamic interplay between perception and response. McCall’s installations radically reimagine cinematic space and the experience of duration and movement.

His work resists simple classification. Oscillating between the physical and the intangible, stillness and motion, clarity and ambiguity, McCall creates what might be called “sculptures of time.” His practice has continuously evolved alongside technological shifts, yet remains grounded in a consistent philosophical inquiry. In an age where image-based art is increasingly immersive, McCall’s approach remains visionary and relevant. Rather than tracing a linear evolution, McCall’s oeuvre reveals a structure of recursiveness and variation. This exhibition foregrounds his enduring question—can light be sculpted beyond the image?—and shows how that question has been persistently and rigorously pursued over decades. In doing so, it presents McCall’s work as a future-facing lens through which we may reimagine the spatial and sensory contours of our time.

Artist Introduction

Anthony McCall (born 1946, St. Paul’s Cray, UK) is known for his ‘Solid-Light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with “Line Describing a Cone,” in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space. Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, McCall’s works elaborate upon the idea of “Expanded Cinema,” combining elements of film, sculpture, and drawing, and offering immersive experiences that necessitate the audience’s physical engagement.

For McCall’s exhibition at Futura Seoul, six works will be on view: Traveling Wave

(1972/2013), Landscape for Fire (1972), Breath III (2011), Circulation Figures (1972/2011),

Between You and I (2006), and Skylight (2020). Particularly notable is the vertical Solid Light

installation Skylight (2020), which will be shown at full-scale for the first time at Futura

Seoul and featuring a soundtrack by composer David Grubbs. McCall’s vertical

projections fit the unique spatial characteristics of Futura Seoul’s 100 Poems space, a large

vertical hall that was designed responsively to works like McCall’s, to host unorthodox

digital media works. Also in 100 Poems is Between You and I (2006), a vertical installation

of two projected forms side by side.

Early works on view including Circulation Figures (1972/2011) and Landscape for Fire (1972)

originated with a fundamental inquiry: “Can film itself become a performance, rather

than merely recording one?” Later, McCall experimented with film formally as a medium, focusing on how the projector’s light cuts through space, illuminating the ambient dust

and smoke. P. Adams Sitney, in his landmark history of avant-garde cinema, Visionary

Film: The American Avant-Garde, described McCall’s installations of the 1970s as, “the most

brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic

situation.”