There’s a reason millions of visitors are obsessed with teamLab’s art exhibitions: Where else can you spend an otherwise normal afternoon gazing into an infinity of crystal stars, chasing digital crows from room to room, or making flowers grow with the touch of a single, godlike finger?
TeamLab, an international collective of mathematicians, engineers and artists emerged in 2001, gaining traction with an early staging by the artist Takashi Murakami. Since then, the group, whose works aim to “navigate the confluence of art, science, technology and the natural world,” has expanded globally, with permanent and temporary exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the United States. Last year, teamLab Planets, in Tokyo, welcomed 2.5 million people, setting a Guinness record as the most visited museum by a single art group.
TeamLab currently has 12 exhibitions in Japan, as well as sites in places like Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Macau, Miami, New York, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Installations or museums are planned for Hamburg, Germany; Utrecht, the Netherlands; Kyoto, Japan; and more.
These sensory playgrounds couldn’t be farther from a sterile white art gallery. You may find yourself wading through a pool (yes, actual water) with digital koi fish or playing with streaming whirlpools of pixels. Sometimes the installations are set outdoors in dark rice paddies, as in Izura, Japan, or use strings of live orchids that rise and drop depending on your path, as at the Planets museum. In “Sketch” installations at several sites you use crayons to color in a creature, which then comes alive as a projection on the walls and the floor.
The colors, textures and lighting are ripe for Instagramming, leading some critics to dismiss the installations as art candy or a tourist trap. But they also explore bigger themes of self, boundaries, interconnection, and life and death in the natural world. They lead you on a psychedelic journey without taking actual psychedelics.
Here are eight places around the globe where you can get a taste of the trippy and thrilling teamLab experience.
Tokyo
Be ready to take off your shoes and get wet at teamLab Planets (admission 3,800 to 5,400 yen, or $26 to $37), which opened new rooms in January. This linear interactive space, in the city’s Toyosu district, features elements like trampolines, mirrors, water and garden rooms. Inside, you can peer into a crystal starscape, wander through an immersive flower garden and wade with fluorescent koi. The new “Catching and Collecting Extinct Forest” installation allows you to catch and release digital endangered animals while learning about them on an integrated app. In the “Sketch” space, you can color your own creatures to be projected into the exhibit, and then in the Factory, buy a T-shirt with your creature on it. Even Emptiness Table, the museum’s vegan ramen restaurant, offers an ever-changing digital art experience.
Borderless (¥3,600 to ¥5,600), teamLab’s other major Tokyo museum, in the Azabudai Hills district, is a nonlinear series of rooms to explore with no map and no directions. Clustered around a central waterfall, the rooms splinter off, with themes and motifs like bubbles and digital crows that fly from one installation to another. Take as long as you want to feel your way through. At the attached teahouse, enjoy the infinitely blooming flowers projected into your cup.
New York City
Generated by a computer program using data points influenced by the season, sunrise and sunset, “Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity II” (free) is a digital garden of seasonal blossoms such as chrysanthemums, azaleas and hydrangeas. The evolving garden, which never repeats but echoes the real weather conditions outside, is displayed on a roughly 27-by-16-foot public screen in the lobby of 1 Vanderbilt, a skyscraper next door to Grand Central Terminal. The work, which dominates a route frequented by commuters, seems designed to be viewed consistently by the same people across seasons and years.
Miami
“Between Life and Non-Life” ($32), part of the immersive Superblue Miami museum, explores growth and regeneration by inviting visitors to interact with digital flowers, vines and water on the walls and floor amid pulsating ambient music. Touch the wall, then step back and quietly watch the plants grow, die and be washed away, only to begin the cycle again. For an extra charge, visitors can also walk through teamLab’s “Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life” exhibit, a space filled with floating, fluffy masses of cloudlike suds. Superblue also features spaces by artists like Es Devlin and James Turrell.
Izura, Japan
“Hidden Traces of Rice Terraces,” a nighttime-only outdoor project (¥2,400), “explores how nature can become art” by using digital technology to avoid harming the installation’s natural environment of abandoned rice fields in a forest by the sea. Lanterns guide visitors as they trace the borders of rice terraces along a mirrorlike path of water while projected light and music create an ethereal effect using the trees, waves and terrain. In a forest space, beams of light shoot past like a long-exposure photo of fireflies. On a beach installation, when the waves rise, projected flowers bloom, symbolizing the breath of life. The site, about two and a half hours by train northeast of Tokyo, sits near a hot spring hotel, where you can extend the otherworldly teamLab experience with a hot soak amid the installations (rooms start at ¥19,177).
Singapore
Surrounding the centerpiece 130-foot Jewel Rain Vortex waterfall inside Changi Airport, the living “Resonating Forest — Shiseido Forest Valley” (free) shines and dims, with individual colored lights illuminating each tree as if it’s breathing. The lights change tone depending on the tree’s elevation and spread to the nearby trees, adapting as travelers pass.
“Digital Light Canvas” (8.55 Singapore dollars, or about $6.60) at the Marina Bay Sands hotel, echoes the Jewel Rain Vortex, but with crystal lights acting as the water. As in other teamLab locations, visitors can hand-color creatures, but here they are projected onto the floor below the simulated waterfall.
Abu Dhabi
TeamLab Phenomena, a white, undulating waterfront museum (150 dirhams, or about $41), sits alongside Louvre Abu Dhabi and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the Saadiyat Cultural District. The rotating installations inside, all linked to the theme “environmental phenomena,” include interactive whirlpools simulating ones found in Japan, a room full of moving beams of light that converge to create giant sculptures, and floating metallic eggs that respond to a wading visitor’s touch with sound. In one space, “Levitation Void,” a black sphere hovering at the center of a red-lit room moves in response to visitors.
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