Tokyo museum looks to 'expand the beautiful'
A Japanese member of Teamlab collective walks and poses in a digital installation waterfall room, filled with flowers which appears to flow over a hill, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Tokyo.
The waterfall appears to run down the wall of a room and across the floor, but the flow is an illusion — a digital exhibit at a new interactive museum in Tokyo.
The flower-filled waterfall is the work of Japanese collective teamLab, known internationally for their innovative “digital art” that combines projections, sound and carefully designed spaces to create other-worldly, immersive experiences. After exhibitions around the world, they are opening this summer a museum dedicated entirely to their unique brand of artwork.
One space of the museum features a bucolic rice field, another is filled with seemingly endless hanging lamps that illuminate as the visitor nears, the light moving from one lamp to another around the room. Elsewhere, a waterfall filled with flowers appears to flow over a hill or waves crash along the walls, throwing spray toward the ceiling.
The exhibits are designed to flow into one another and interact with each other and the viewers.
“We have created a borderless world made up of pieces of artwork that move by themselves, communicate with each other and mix perfectly with others,” said teamLab co-founder Toshiyuki Inoko, 41.
Some exhibits also encourage visitor participation — in one, viewers are “propelled into space” by bouncing on a trampoline in the midst of an intergalactic projection, in another they can dance in unison with performers who appear as translucent silhouettes.
Inoko, who has a background in physics, founded teamLab in 2001 with four fellow Tokyo University students.In 2014, New York’s Pace Gallery began promoting their work, and in 2015, they organized their first exhibition in Japan, drawing nearly 500,000 visitors over 130 days. Since then, they have shown across the world, with exhibitions in London, Silicon Valley, China and elsewhere and the collective has grown to some 500 members.
Dubbed the “Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless,” the facility will open its doors on June 21, charging 3,200 yen a ticket (US$29).
The collective say they want to use digital technology to “expand the beautiful.”
