The basic checklist for first-timers to Japan is predictable: Eat at a conveyer belt sushi joint, catch a peek of Mount Fuji, ride the shinkansen, cross Shibuya scramble. Over the past few years, one more item has found its place firmly on the list, scrawled in technicolor: take a selfie at teamLab.
The art collective founded in Japan operates site-specific works across Asia, and is expanding in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. TeamLab’s Planets museum in Tokyo’s Koto Ward, which had about a million overseas visitors over six months last year, was scheduled to close in 2024, but with overseas tourists to Japan returning to pre-COVID-19 numbers, the collective plans to keep it open until 2027. At the same time, teamLab reopens its Borderless museum this week at Azabudai Hills, after the Odaiba location closed in August 2022. These sprawling, maze-like facilities just 6 kilometers away from each other are good for tourism and good for business — but as teamLab popularity reaches a saturation point among the culture-loving public, it’s worth asking if the collective’s endless expansion is good for the experience itself.
Borderless, again
TeamLab opened its Borderless museum in Tokyo’s Odaiba in 2018. Against black walls, trippy digital sunflowers floated across waterfalls; a mirrored room full of hanging lamps glowed blue, then fire orange; swirls of light flew this way and that across densely packed ropes of flashing LEDs. Riding off the success of Random International’s Rain Room and Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, the museum was an Instagrammer’s delight and a huge hit. In 2019, it broke a Guinness World Record for the most visitors to a museum dedicated to a single art group or artist in a year, reaching over 2 million visitors.
This week, teamLab Borderless reopens with 50 independent works as part of Azabudai Hills, Mori Building’s new 8.1-hectare mega-complex construction. It will feel exceedingly familiar to fans of the first location, with the same dizzying tunnels of flying flowers, butterflies, creatures, water and quivering squiggles.
One notable exception is a new light sculpture installation, which shows about 20 distinct works in succession. Over 1,000 lights cover the walls, floor and ceiling in a deep chamber. They are programmed to rotate, looking like animatronic dancers and producing a light show that would surely send tripped-out ravers into a slack-jawed trance. Where many of teamLab’s projections are flat, gentle and pretty, the depth of this room sucks the viewer into a staggering hypnotic vortex from which it’s impossible to look away. In some projections, the lights are fine and hair-like, creating the texture of an all-encompassing spider web, while at other times the sculpture is powerful, throbbing and pulsing as an energetic whirlpool. In others, the center of the lights takes the shape of a god, or a cell, or a womb.
Given that the viewer can’t cross into the space, and that only one of the many pieces is interactive, it’s closer to a more conventional art setup: less playful, with the potential to be more meditative and absorbing, if the view doesn’t become cluttered with phones. (I was repeatedly scolded, however, for trying to sit and just watch.)
Another space projects butterflies, flowers and amorphous shapes onto sheets of mist the viewer can walk through. Another piece, the crowd-favorite room of lamps from Borderless 1.0, has evolved into a room of light bubbles, which interact with each other and the bodies passing by.
Otherwise, the museum is classic teamLab. The crowd-pleaser Infinite Crystal World, with its sheets of LED lights that show fast-paced visualizations, returns. A room in which light pools around a raised platform, mimicking water falling on a rock, is a ready-to-go photo backdrop. Like its predecessor, the museum is maze-like by design. I went in actual circles repeatedly and twice hit my head on my own reflection, colliding with mirrored walls as I tried to find the exit. There are no maps and few wall captions — just as well, as the piece names are not at all helpful.
It’s telling, in fact, how useless the titles are: “Life is an ephemeral light that blooms in the dark” could easily describe any number of pieces. “An existence without center or boundary”? Is that the one with the lights wobbling, jelly-like? Or the one with the lights chasing, bird-like? Oh, it’s the one with the lines wiggling, cell-like. Indeed, it’s an important part of being immersed in the museum that visitors don’t passively view distinct and static works but rather flow through a jumble of corridors and rooms that are best described in terms of experiences.
There is one artwork in teamLab’s Planets museum, for example, that I have forever named “the one where I dropped my phone in a pool of digital carp slash actual water.”
Flattened worlds
Borderless and its neighbor museum, Planets, are good fun and a fine way to spend a day, especially if the weather is bad, and especially if it’s your first time.
I had a blast at my first teamLab production. It was one of the last days of 2019 at the original Borderless building, and despite the hour-long wait and the crowds of New Year’s tourists, I found it to be a neat blend of museum, amusement park and art playground, full of surprises big and small. Four years later, and I’ve seen teamLab in a sauna, at the opera, projected onto a castle and as a forest full of gotta-catch-em-all animals. Obviously, I have many cool photos saved from over the years. (If you didn’t selfie, did you even teamLab?) But now having seen many iterations of the digital art, at some point, unlike the images, the magic stopped regenerating.
It’s precisely the way teamLab trains us to experience it, and the same reason it’s been so successful, that it has the potential to stale so quickly after the first visit. The onslaught of stimulation and constant pressure to both interact and capture gives very little room for reflection, stillness or observation. In contrast with the predominant way we buy, consume and appreciate art today — through the emphasis on one or a few named artists — teamLab disappears into a faceless brand entity. We are discouraged from thinking about craft: teamLab is very cagey about the technical aspects of what must surely be painstaking coding and design, and even cagier about just how many people do that work, though a 2021 Artnet interview with co-founder Toshiyuki Inoko cited more than 600 people. When the publicity team was asked to confirm or deny this number, however, they unequivocally replied, “We don’t know.”
In the absence of any social or political commentary, expression of identity or information about the labor of creation, we are given little to chew on, left instead to chase after butterflies with our phones and sidestep selfie Hunger Games.
The digital art collective prides itself on making works that are never the same twice — but the differences between each moment are not actually significant. Both the meaning and the pictures are nearly the same every time, and more or less the same as everyone else’s experience, reflected in social media photo dumps. All slick and surface, the works don’t sustain any kind of emotional or intellectual relationship with the viewer over multiple viewings, the way great art has the potential to do.
Seeing 50 teamLab works gathered in one place shows the overwhelming and impressive scale of the collective’s output. But rather than highlighting the versatility of an artist, the way some large-scale retrospectives do for single artists, it brings out the sameness of the entire experience. Works blend together into a digital tangle, mirrored surfaces and angled floors double up and back on each other.
This is further exacerbated by having two museums so close to one another, something not Takashi Murakami or Yayoi Kusama, not even Harry Potter or Studio Ghibli or Pokemon, has done in a single Japanese metropolis.
When teamLab is called upon by a corporate collaborator to make a site-specific work — in a bathhouse, at a castle, in a train terminal — it actually works within the constraints of a physical place and becomes part of that place. Indeed, I’ve found the one-off projects, rather than the collections of greatest hits, more rewarding as a viewer, as they offer a chance to observe the creative risks and constraints at the level of one work.
But in the large-scale museums, the works dissolve any sense of site, becoming entirely self-referential. And the two spaces so close to one another do a disservice to teamLab’s own creative output, flattening any possibility of uniqueness and turning each into a corporate copy of the other. As if to say: “Either one. It’s all the same.”
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