Mori Building and TeamLab will open “Mori Building Digital Art Museum: Epson TeamLab Borderless” (“TeamLab Borderless”) in Azabudai Hills on February 9.
TeamLab Borderless opened in Odaiba, Tokyo in June 2018 as a hands-on museum where visitors can appreciate “art without boundaries,” and closed in August 2022 to move to Azabudai Hills. Now, it will be relaunched as an evolved “Tokyo-Japan Destination” with approximately 50 works of art, including some that are being exhibited for the first time in the world.
On February 5, just prior to its opening, a preview of the entire museum was held for the press. TeamLab Borderless is characterized by the fact that it is a “museum without a map,” meaning that there is no set route or way of seeing the museum.
Visitors stroll from room to room as if they were wandering through “one continuous world without boundaries,” freely enjoying “art in constant motion” linked with light, sound, and scent.
For example, “Memory of Terrain,” which depicts an eternal satoyama landscape in a space of varying elevations; “Animals Living with Flowers,” which changes and rotates with the seasons; and “Haze Sculpture,” in which the body seems to be enveloped in lines of light and smoke.
These works of art themselves move fluidly, intricately related to and sometimes mixed with other works of art. The walls, floors, and ceilings are constantly transforming without boundaries, so that even if you take a photo or video of a scene, you will never see it “the same way” again.
The various motifs of flowers, birds, wind, and the moon are lost or multiply when touched, or swirl as if they follow you when you walk.
Of the more than 50 works, two works of particular interest are “Bubble Universe” and “Megalith Crystal Formation,” which can only be viewed here in the world.
Bubble Universe” is a work in which the exhibition space is filled with countless spheres. The mixture of different light phenomena within each sphere is said to represent “cognition and existence (the existence of phenomena in a continuous relationship with the environment).
The “Megalith Crystal Formation” is a space into which various works by Team Lab Borderless flow.
One of them, “Flowers and People – Megalith Crystal Formation (work in progress),” immerses the viewer in a scene in which petals are repeatedly born and die in response to the viewer’s movements.
In addition, visitors can not only appreciate digital art, but also experience the fun of creating it through play at the “Sketch Ocean” (an aquarium for drawing connected to the world), where their own drawings swim in a wall of water and become part of the artwork.
The artwork can be made into original goods, such as badges and T-shirts, to take home with you.
At the “Tea House,” where visitors can take a break between viewings, even the menu items, such as mizu-dashi green tea and ice cream, are works of art.
Flowers that bloom and fall repeatedly are projected onto a bowl of tea, as if there is a small universe inside the bowl, and branches and leaves grow and sprout from a plate of matcha ice cream.
According to Emi Ohki, a TeamLab Borderless staff member who gave us a tour of the facility, “It is a place where you can experience the world of art without losing your own will, walking around freely, rather than creating boundaries through a lens like in photography, or fixing your body and viewing from a predetermined perspective like in movies. Instead, it is a place where one can walk around freely and experience the world of art without losing one’s own will.
Works of art and works of art mingle with each other, living things cease to exist and are born again, and phenomena are repeatedly transformed by the actions of the viewer. The artist hopes that visitors will feel such “beauty of continuity” through his art.
© Source travel watch