Imagine being inside one of Dan Flavins neon tubes, surrounded so completely by gaseous electric-orange or acid-green light that nothing else exists within your field of vision. The experience would be close to the effect of Feelings Are Facts, a collaborative installation by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and Beijing architect Ma Yansong at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

For the show, running through June 20, Eliasson and Ma have built a long, low-ceilinged room in the institution's largest exhibition hall that compels visitors to enter and exit using a single door. Inside, a thick, artificially produced fog — pumped in at regular intervals through wall vents — is lit by hundreds of variously colored fluorescent tubes set into the ceiling. The brightly hued light is caught and magnified by the mist, engulfing the visitor in what amounts to an encounter with pure color. Spencer Finch and Mark Rothko suddenly seem tentative and chaste. (As do the casinos of Las Vegas and the skyline of Pudong, for that matter.)

Moving though the installation with the awareness that the architecture, too, is playing perceptual tricks, one begins to make a map: take a few steps to the left, and you pass through Day-Glo pink and plunge into an impossibly deep violet; step to the right, and a field of piercing sky blue takes shape. The colors, bright and all-encompassing, suggest the plumes produced over a Bunsen burner when certain chemicals are mixed, as well as obscure meteorological phenomena. Perception is both intensified and consolidated: the rods and cones that comprise the mechanics of sight receive a sudden promotion, while the visitor’s internal GPS is temporarily disconnected.

The installation may call to mind the work of the California artists, like James Turrell, who since the mid-1960s have taken light and space as their primary materials. But while Turrell often creates skylights, thresholds, and other framing devices to produce controlled viewing experiences, Eliasson and Ma build no such separations between the visitor and the artwork. Instead, their installation has a stronger connection to Ann Veronica Janssens works incorporating steam and colored light.

Beijing audiences may find the extraordinary J.M.W. Turner exhibition that toured to the China's National Art Museum last spring another valuable point of reference. In addition to his gift for narrative, it was Turner’s fascination with the physiology of vision —  in particular the solar after-images he experienced by staring directly into the sun — that made his violent, stormy skies and sunsets so powerful. Eliasson and Ma, however, are not as interested in revisiting the past as they are in asking visitors to consider the perceptual frameworks used to parse the present.

However vivid the colors appear in Feelings Are Facts, this is not a purely optical experience in which the body — that flabby anchor — is cast aside so that the viewer’s gaze glides unimpeded toward a sort of transcendence. On the contrary, such fantasies are intentionally foreclosed by Ma’s manipulation of the installation’s architectural characteristics. Ma’s essential contribution to the work has commanded less critical attention precisely because its success depends on subtlety. By giving the floor a soft, unpredictable incline that one must traverse for nearly 200 feet, Ma doesn’t take visitors over a precipice so much as foster the precarious feeling that one is constantly walking along a cliff’s edge. It is an effect that erodes one’s navigational confidence so effectively that it forces each participant’s toes and fingers to become extensions of sight, awkwardly “feeling” a way through empty space.

Feelings Are Facts is also the name that the pioneering dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer chose for her autobiography, published in 2006. “If you’re interested in Plato,” Rainer warns readers at the outset, “you’re reading the wrong book.” It’s an association I couldn’t help but make as I wandered through the installation's hazy cave of color fields, willingly dazzled by a phantasmagoria exactingly designed by Eliasson and Ma to temporarily obliterate intellect through the celebration of retinal and corporeal experience. Ideally, one exits their installation not — as Plato’s myth suggests — in order to seek the intangible truth, but with a tacit understanding that everything but the purely sensate is suspect.