The evening begins with a walk around the foothills of a sacred mountain. As I navigate the rocky path, past ancient Buddhist shrines set into the stone, the forest around me bursts into colour — blue, purple, pink, yellow — creating a kaleidoscopic canopy that illuminates the night sky.
The dance of light is by teamLab, an art and technology collective known for its spectacular digital installations. They have come here, to the grounds of the Mifuneyama Rakuen hotel, a traditional ryokan in southern Japan, each year since 2015 to create this immersive art show.
My guide, teamLab’s Takashi Kudo, leads me to a teahouse where we are served green tea in near darkness. A projection of a chrysanthemum blossoms in my glass bowl, its scattering petals spilling on to the table underneath. As I pick the vessel up, then put it down, the pink flower stays on the surface of the liquid, following the bowl’s movements, the high-tech illusion enabled by temperature sensors in the projector that detect the tea’s heat.
“The artwork exists only in the tea. Once you’ve finished drinking, it’s gone, but the experience will stay with you,” Kudo says. This is teamLab’s philosophy in a nutshell: to give people a totally immersive, interactive experience of art which lingers in the mind long after you’ve participated in it.
Two days later I am at teamLab’s headquarters in Tokyo to meet Toshiyuki Inoko, 46, a mathematician by training who founded the collective in 2001 with four others — all mathematicians, engineers and robotics specialists. In February, teamLab will open a second, permanent gallery in the city, teamLab Borderless, in a luxury building complex developed by the property company Mori.
Their aim was always to make great art using technology developed or adapted in-house, such as motion sensors and projection mapping, which turns irregularly shaped objects into suitable surfaces for projecting images, but in the beginning they supported themselves through software development and corporate work. Their break in the art world came in 2011 when artist Takashi Murakami invited the collective to show at the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Taipei following a visit to their studio.
Today teamLab’s art is everywhere in Japan, in restaurants and botanical gardens, hotels and shopping centres. Their guiding principle is to “say yes to everything”, says Inoko. And it shows. Although it is nearly 8pm, the teamLab building still buzzes with activity. Everywhere you turn there are clusters of young staff members in T-shirts huddled together with their laptops. In one room, an engineer proudly shows me a circuit board he is working on. In another, I play with semi-transparent ovoids which light up in different colours when you push them. Then there is the botanical team, testing several different kinds of mosses to establish the precise growing conditions for each one. The vibe is more Silicon Valley start-up than strait-laced Japanese corporation.
Inoko himself, with his pinstriped denim outfit, silver-star pendant hanging around his neck and tousled black hair, cuts an unconventional figure for a Japanese chief executive presiding over a company of 1,000 employees. In fact, he does not call himself a chief executive at all; almost nobody at teamLab has a title, to emphasise the collective nature of the work done here, they say. Other anomalous practices were recorded in a 2017 case study by Harvard Business School, which noted that teamLab “did not set sales targets or develop business plans” and “profits were shared equally by employees”.
I ask Inoko how teamLab copes with the crowds who flock to see their art. TeamLab Planets, their first space in Tokyo, which opened in 2018, welcomed an average 8,000 people a day in October. He explains that the presence of visitors was factored in from the beginning: through technology, teamLab’s installations respond to people so that each work is always evolving, never the same.
“When an artwork doesn’t change through the existence of others, then other people become a nuisance,” he says. “Tourists standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre are a bother when you want to look at the painting. But if the entire space changes as a result of others, then you have a relationship with them within the artwork space. We want to create installations where people recognise they are connected to other people.”
The Infinite Crystal Universe, a soaring installation of flashing LED lights and mirrors at teamLab Planets, for example, is manipulated by visitors who use their smartphones or a control panel in the space to change the colour of the lights or the speed at which they flash. “The work is created by people in the space and is thus continuously changing forever,” teamLab says.
Inoko answers nearly every other question I ask him by returning to his favourite subject: pictorial perspective. “I could talk about this forever,” he says. Specifically, he contends that non-linear perspective, traditional in Asian art, is a more useful way of looking at the world than the perspective found in western painting from the Renaissance to the advent of Modernism.
Western paintings fix the viewer, immobile, in front of a canvas because of their single vantage point, he says, whereas eastern perspective, with its “wide focus”, encourages movement and engagement with a work of art, approximating more accurately to our relationship with the real world. Translating this sense of continuity between artwork and viewer into digital installations is “something we’ve been interested in since the beginning of teamLab”.
Take, for example, the show-stopper at teamLab Planets, Floating in the Falling Universe of Flowers. In a darkened gallery, tens of thousands of flowers are projected on to the dome-shaped ceiling and walls. The illusion is extraordinary: the flowers appear unconstrained by the surface they are projected on to, cascading towards you, budding, blossoming, finally wilting in an explosion of colour. In keeping with the tradition of eastern perspective, “the space of the work is continuous with the space where the viewer’s body is located”, says Inoko. This, then, is art that literally draws you into itself.
Now teamLab’s mesmerising artworks are spreading across the world. They already have installations in China and Singapore, and in the US their work is currently on display at Superblue, an art and technology space in Miami co-founded by Pace Gallery, which has represented teamLab since 2013.
A massive new museum, designed by teamLab and devoted entirely to their art, is under construction in Abu Dhabi, just down the road from the Louvre in the Saadiyat Cultural District (construction will finish in 2024, no opening date has yet been announced), and another gallery is planned for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Permanent displays are also coming to Hamburg, Germany, and Utrecht in the Netherlands.
TeamLab Borderless, the February opening, will include digital artworks which “interact with each other, influence each other, overlap and are constantly moving out of individual rooms and throughout the entire gallery”, encouraging people to follow them, Inoko says. “We wanted to create a space in which people might feel that continuity itself is beautiful.”
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