Wander, Explore with Intention, Discover, Create: teamLab Borderless opens in Shanghai

Writer Emma-Kate Wilson considers collective teamLab latest offering to the digital museum experience in China for teamLab Borderless Shanghai, opening November 5, 2019.

MutualArt
MutualArt
Nov 6 · 6 min read
Exhibition view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai, 2019, Huangpu District, Shanghai © teamLab

The closest experience that can be likened to the teamLab Borderless Shanghai museum is stargazing. As the night’s sky glistens with a vision of twinkling dots, all you can do is relax into the overwhelming sense of scale. These emotions are valid for the art collective’s museum. An attempt to see every star would be futile. Instead, look and watch — envision the world that is being illuminated around you.

teamLab Borderless Shanghai is made up of metrics: 480 computers, 470 projectors, over 1,000 moving lights, 6,600sm of space, and 50 artworks. teamLab, themselves, are a collective of numbers that works within the mysticism of the digital art world. Each project has a team of artists, designers, architects, and curators who work towards a unified experience of a single vision. The group share the hierarchy, with 80% as engineers specialising in computer programming, joined by architects, mathematicians, CG animators, designers and editors. So how does this perplexing compilation, perhaps more suited to a science lab, translate into a museum experience?

Exterior view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai © teamLab

The MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless in Odaiba, Tokyo is the first example of how incredibly well this can be done. The varied technicians build interactive light shows and installations that react to the audience for artworks that only appear once with artificial intelligence responsive to human interaction. On November 5, 2019, teamLab are bringing the Borderless experience to the Huangpu District in Shanghai, with never-seen-before visuals and an expanded sense of existing artworks on grander scales.

Tokyo’s teamLab Borderless hit 2.3 million visitors within their first year of business, more than any other museum dedicated to a single artist. The world is ready for another venue in China, where success can be measured by Instagram likes and photography credits. The one glaring difference between looking out to space and visiting a museum is the potential to capture the moment. teamLab Borderless is a wholly digital world, and as such, the museum works perfectly as a backdrop for the photoshoots that appear across every travel blog and Instagram. However, for teamLab, this feeds into a collective experience shared across the world — an element that will feed directly into teamLab Borderless Shanghai. How? We are yet to see, but in the writer’s opinion, it may be a ticket that opens a democratic social media in China, a country with blocked access to Facebook and Instagram.

Central to the teamLab Borderless Shanghai museum is just that — a borderless experience. The museum offers no map or sense of direction. Instead, you are invited to explore a world that shifts and changes as you move through the space. The artworks are continuously moving in ways that feel impossible to imagine. Partly because often art museums are still focused on stationary paintings and sculpture that offer more momentum to time.

Exhibition view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai, 2019, Huangpu District, Shanghai © teamLab

“Artworks move out of rooms, communicate with other works, influence, and sometimes intermingle with each other with no boundaries,” teamLab share. “Visitors will immerse their bodies in borderless art in this vast, complex world — they wander, explore with intention, discover, and create a new world with others.”

teamLab Borderless Shanghai will continue the theme of monumental artworks such as the Forest of Lamps installation that is 1.5 times larger than the one in Tokyo. Forest of Resonating Lamps — One Stroke is made up of hundreds of Murano glass lamps that float throughout the room, against the blacked-out museum. All you see is a vision of light that is responding to your presence. When a visitor passes close to a lamp, it shines brightly and emits a colour, then slowly the fire-esque visuals spread throughout the entire installation as a visual representation of the connectivity of life.

Exhibition view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai, 2019, Huangpu District, Shanghai © teamLab

As the lights transfer, the visitors are illuminated in the gallery, revealing their proximities. teamLab muse, “by having a larger artwork space, more people will be able to see how their own presence and the presence of unrelated others has a visible, beautiful impact on the shared physical space, allowing them to see other museum-goers in a more positive light.”

It’s a museum where artworks leave rooms, communicate with each other, and fuse together. The ideas behind the museum hope to connect the audience to the natural world by creating a beating heart of activity that responds to the physicality of humanness. One artwork that speaks to this narrative is Forest of Flowers and People: Lost, Immersed and Reborn, which was first exhibited at PACE Beijing. The artwork is rendered in real-time by a computer program, no two encounters will be the same. It also changes over time, with flowers falling to decay before regrowing in abundance.

The team explain the perplexity of working on such large artworks. “[We] created it with a specialist who creates 3D CG flower model and animation, a 3D software programmer, an engineer who designs equipment such as projectors, a software programmer who localizes and integrates dozens of projectors within the space.”

Exhibition view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai, 2019, Huangpu District, Shanghai © teamLab

Where flowers grow in the Forest of Flowers and People, while Flutter of Butterflies Beyond Borders, Ephemeral Life Born from People sees butterflies filling the backdrop. The flowers and butterflies echo narratives of humankind’s position within the continuity of life. When the visitor stands still, flowers and butterflies grow from their presence — but when the person reaches out to touch these, the creatures and florals scatter and die. teamLab reflects, “we hope is that people will see the beauty of this continuous, borderless world, which will expand their value systems, even if by just a little bit.”

Another site-responsive highlight from the museum in Tokyo includes a visit to the EN TEA HOUSE, for Flowers Bloom in an Infinite Universe inside a Teacup. As cups fill with physical tea, flower visuals bloom, responding to the measure of liquid. Visitors share that if they spill their tea, the flowers “spill” as well.

“Because the Borderless World is constantly changing due to the presence of others, no two moments will ever be the same,” teamLab explore. “As a result, it is hard to say what a “full experience” in the museum would be since it is impossible to see every single thing.” Instead, it’s about getting lost in the museum, letting yourself go to the passing of time and try to relax into the spectacular show.

Exhibition view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai, 2019, Huangpu District, Shanghai © teamLab

Time shifts in the gallery with the audience’s participation, expanding on formal theories of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics — in that social participation is critical to the complexities of the work. Adding to that, if art is to be new and relevant, it should resist the existing models. That is, away from the walls of museums painted white or in Euro-centric principles of art history.

While teamLab are a global collective, their philosophies feel rooted within the focus of Japanese art — one of the fragilities and impermanence of human interaction with the natural world; changing seasons, and a collective identity unbound by culture.

Exhibition view of teamLab Borderless Shanghai, 2019, Huangpu District, Shanghai © teamLab

teamLab Borderless is a technical masterpiece, but it brings together a collective experience, for children and adults to enjoy and play. Because of the overarching nature theme, teamLab hope it inspires the audience to think globally about their connection to the world and nature. Where traditional art is a one-way conversation between a static piece and a viewer, in teamLab’s digital art, the presence and touch of a human can change the whole work, encouraging utopian physicality with the world around us.

teamLab are represented by PACE gallery


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MutualArt

MutualArt is your one-stop source to the art market, from auction prices to the most exciting exhibitions and art analytics. Magazine: https://bit.ly/2ma8Xf1

MutualArt Magazine

MutualArt is your one-stop source to the art market, from auction prices to the most exciting exhibitions and art analytics. Magazine: https://bit.ly/2ma8Xf1

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