‘Ever since we were founded, we’ve decided to create through the process of collaborative creation,’ says Japan’s aptly named collective teamLab. Founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, the studio specialises in technologically ambitious and highly personal digital art installations that focus on what it means to be human, and above this, the creation of new relationships between humans and nature.
A sense of place plays an important role too: ‘We are most interested in places formed by the accumulation of the interaction and activities between people and nature: places that transcend our own existence, regardless of where they might be,’ they say. ‘For example, the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in China are a place formed by the accumulation of the interaction and activities between people and nature over the course of a time indefinitely longer than our own existence, much like the forest and stones of Mifuneyama Rakuen.’
Reversible Rotation, Flying Beyond Borders — One Stroke, Cold Light. Shanghai, China, 2019. © teamLab
Tunnel into the Void, Shanghai, China, 2019. © teamLab
TeamLab’s work is now on permanent display in Shanghai’s Borderless Museum and Tokyo’s MORI Digital Art Museum. ‘It’s almost like you’re inside them, swimming under water,’ Pace London director Tamara Corm says of teamLab’s mesmeric installations. Her gallery welcomed the critically acclaimed ‘Transcending Boundaries’ exhibition in 2017, which plunged visitors into unexpected darkness and then into a large room filled with disorientating light and music, neon butterflies, and flowers that bloomed on demand.
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