BORN in 1967 in Copenhagen, Eliasson is celebrated for his sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water and air temperature to enhance the viewing experience.

Nicknamed the “artist with the brain of a scientist,” Eliasson established Studio Olafur Eliasson in 1995 in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research. He said he had the luck to work with a group of natural scientists, sociologists and political scientists ­— “each one with his or her own creativity and work mode.”

The uniqueness of his exhibitions and projects seems to galvanize public interest and inspire legions of fans everywhere.

Since 1997, his critically acclaimed solo shows have appeared in major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan. At the Danish Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1914, he filled an entire wing with stones as water as part of an installed entitled “Riverbed.”

Yet despite all the hyperbole that surrounds him, the humble Eliasson remains strangely divorced from his own fame.

“Let me tell you one amazing secret,” he said to Shanghai Daily. “I am an absolutely ordinary person. Nobody knows that, but it’s a fact. I am not a star artist. Art is thoroughly different from fashion.”

He then went on to give an exclusive interview about his work and the current exhibition.

Q: Many of your best-known works are site-specific installations, so why did you choose to do the exhibition here at the Long Museum?

A: Because the museum was kind enough to invite me. That’s how it works. As an artist, you don’t actually choose the museum; the museum chooses you.

It is a very beautiful building, sitting here on the river, which is very interesting, too. It is a part of a city development, which is obviously trying to discern what the future of the city is going to be. The river has a lot of new buildings, and I am curious about the fact that the city is trying to create its new identity.

I also like the Long Museum because it was created by young architects from the Atelier Deshaus. This is maybe their first big building. At first, one might think that the concrete walls are a bit rough, but actually I think it is very beautiful that you see what you get, so to speak. In a lot of architecture and in a lot of design, there is often a surface, which is very shiny, maybe marble or gold, and then there is something cheap underneath, some metal structure, right?

But here, you see what you get. What’s inside is what’s outside. So it is very honest. It is not trying to pretend to be something else. That is a very good setting for my works. To see this kind of honesty and transparency in architecture is a great platform for me to show my artworks.

Q: How does the architecture influence your installations?

A: The architecture influenced the show significantly. I made some site-specific works, such as “The Open Pyramid” and “Still River.” I tried to organize the works in a particular sequence so they create a dialogue with the architecture. When you come to a show like this, it is almost like reading chapters in a book. You go from one space to the next space. You look at one artwork at a time, but you still remember what you just saw and you have expectations of what you are about to see.

In that way, the show is like a theaterplay with different acts or a book with different chapters. It is a journey. And the particular architecture of the Long Museum supports this idea of the sequence of a journey, of a story. I actually think it is the viewer, the one who comes to see the show, who is the writer of the story. So the architecture and my works create the possibility for you to create an experience when you come.

Q: What did you wish to say to the public with your new work “The Open Pyramid?”

A: That’s an interesting question and maybe one that visitors might answer themselves. Obviously, I have many ideas, too. I am interested in the traditional shape of the pyramid ­— how it normally represents a hierarchy of power, with people at the top and people at the bottom. I called the work “The Open Pyramid,” right?

It is an accessible pyramid. You can go in, you can go out. I like the idea of deconstructing the shape of the pyramid on the inside. Because if you go in, you also see that it is a cube. Or you imagine it is a cube. It is almost as if it is turned around or inside out.

The pyramid is about your expectations and your experience. I don’t want to suggest or prescribe what experience you should have because then I would be giving myself in power, telling you how to behave.

As a principle, I am against that. I am against pyramids, I am against hierarchies. Instead, I tell you to become the pyramid, right? I ask you to go in, experience it and make your own story.

Q: You use a lot of reflections in your projects. Why do you find them so fascinating?

A: I work a lot with mirrors, transparency and ephemeral materials ­— materials that are not really solid, things that disappear just like the ice from “Still River” behind me here. In two days’ time, these ice blocks will all be gone, and we will put some new ones in their place.

The water we used to make these blocks comes from the Huangpu River. Mirrors are fascinating because what you see is not the mirror, but what it reflects. It is a very strange material because it does not insist on its own presence. The mirror is there, but it is also not there.

Q: You also used ice as an installation in your work “Your Waste of Time” to reflect the difference and commonness regarding the scale of time of glaciers and humans. In the Long Museum, you are using ice again. What are you trying to express this time?

A: “Your Waste of Time” is actually about the environmental crisis and the climate, about pollution and so on. As we can see, these ice blocks behind me here do not look exactly like what we think ice usually looks like.

Normally when we think of ice, we think of something very clear and transparent, maybe even bluish. But as you can see, it is actually incredibly dirty.

So this is what the river in Shanghai looks like. And maybe we need to think more about how to prevent it from becoming more polluted. Besides being about the process, about time passing, this work is also about the environment.

We make many mistakes, such as thinking that we cannot change anything, right? People think that smog is something beyond their control. I am interested in what can turn people into stakeholders in the environment. How do we get people to act, to actually contribute and help change the smog situation? I don’t think people are naturally passive. In fact, I think they can be very active.

I think all my artworks allow people to look and question. When you look at a work of art, of course you are often busy trying to understand it. Sometimes this process of making sense of what you are looking at actually allows you to evaluate or reconsider the way you think about your surroundings.

Maybe it isn’t so easy to understand the artworks because some of them are very abstract. Just like the ice here.

You might wonder, well, why? I mean you can see how it is made. That is very easy. But it is not so easy to see why. And in the process of asking why, we start to ask how we interpret the world around us. I think it is quite important to consider how we actually see the world.