TeamLab, Art’s Greatest Sugar Rush, Is Building an Empire

During an economically challenging period for many cultural institutions, a collective of artists and engineers have lured millions of visitors into their global network of nearly 60 perfectly Instagrammable, immersive art centers and exhibitions, expanding from Japan to China and Saudi Arabia, and, soon, to the United Arab Emirates.

Last year, according to the collective, nearly 2.5 million people visited teamLab Planets Tokyo, one of the empire’s two permanent locations in the city, spending about $25 each on a barefoot experience through a borderless world of art and science that involves dipping into the milky waters of a digital koi pond and crawling under a hanging garden of some 13,000 orchids.

Backstage at what some consider the greatest show in Japan, a small army of technicians roamed dark hallways. They checked on the projectors, lightbulbs and chlorine levels that keep their exhibitions in operation, with sold-out tickets and revenue numbers that can rival those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and maybe the Museum of Modern Art. At teamLab Planets, revenue is close to $60 million, based on a rough calculation of attendance and ticket sales, though the company shares a portion of its proceeds with its sponsor, an e-commerce company named DMM.com.

Many elements of the company’s success are still shrouded in secrecy, according to art experts who have studied the company. TeamLab, a private company, is wary to disclose information about its financial history the way that most art exhibitors of its size do.

“It’s more like an art amusement park or playground,” said Thu-Huong Ha, a culture critic at The Japan Times. “TeamLab also separates itself from the conventions of the art world — it doesn’t credit its artists or discuss craft, and it has a direct relationship with consumers that can circumnavigate gallerists and institutions — in a way that it seems to think is subversive but just ends up smelling corporate.”

So — is teamLab indeed the greatest show in the country, or is it, as some carp, a tourist trap?

“Here’s a better angle,” Takashi Kudo, 47, one of the core members of the art collective, said as he guided a reporter tiptoeing through the rafters dozens of feet above the digital koi, which reappear as streams of colors when visitors bump into their silhouettes, projected on the waters. Children sloshing around the virtual fish oohed and aahed as the environment changed around them.

“If these exhibitions cannot reach an emotional height, then we have failed,” Kudo whispered. “We have to reach people’s hearts.”

Supporting Art by Selling Technology

Employees at teamLab say that they do not have official titles; when pressed, Kudo described himself as a spokesman for the company. In its origin story, teamLab was founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, a graduate of the University of Tokyo’s department of mathematical engineering and information physics, and several other art-loving friends, who charted an untraditional path toward making exhibitions. They would partially subsidize their artworks by developing new technologies that could be sold to other companies or repurposed in their own shows.

“During the day, we would be selling the technology. And at night, we experimented with art,” said Inoko, 47, who has a habit of responding to business questions with philosophical manifestoes on art, human perception and digital space. Together with his colleagues, Inoko developed a concept of “ultra-subjective space,” a framework for attempting to physically immerse viewers in digital artworks instead of being separated from them by a camera lens or a computer screen.

But he didn’t respond directly, for example, when a reporter asked why tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had traveled halfway around the world to experience teamLab Planets, or why the Emiratis are funding the company’s largest-ever exhibition, Phenomena — a sprawling, 183,000-square-foot complex in Abu Dhabi, where construction is expected to finish by the end of this year. Instead, he answered with a complicated story about the metaphysical nature of the Naruto whirlpools spinning in Southern Japan, where he was raised.

“If you put a vortex in a box, it would stop existing,” Inoko said, trying to explain what makes teamLab’s digital artworks so immersive. He hypothesized that “with something like stones, there is a material difference. Stone versus air — that material difference is how you recognize a stone is a stone. But with a vortex there is no material difference.”

After a long pause, he added: “If I were in a box for two weeks, I would die pretty soon and turn into a gooey mess. Life cannot hold a structure on its own.”

Their Digital Domain Shrouds a Desire for Control

At the heart of his extended metaphor — and dozens of teamLab artworks — is an urge to design and control the environment. The group’s approach fuses traditional Japanese concepts like bonsai gardening with the aesthetics of postwar artists like Yayoi Kusama — who by 1965 was already designing her celebrated “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” which transformed paintings into perceptual experiences — and Takashi Murakami, who staged one of the collective’s first exhibitions in 2011.

“He said something along the lines of explaining that we should go to the world, like, right now,” Inoko recalled, crediting Murakami with helping the company expand.

Kudo had joined teamLab a few years earlier. He resembled a monk — “a fashion monk,” as one colleague described him — with trendy black clothes, wireframe glasses and a shaved head with a dreadlock bun at the crown. It was symbolic of his long journey outside of Japan, a decade that included sleeping on benches in Thailand, a backpacking trip to Syria and editing a videogame magazine in Sweden.

“I had just wanted to run away from Japan,” Kudo said, explaining that he returned home after his mother received a cancer diagnosis, and later joined his college friends at teamLab.

“We didn’t know how to sell our artworks back then, so we decided to sell tickets,” Kudo added about the early days. By 2014, teamLab gained representation in the art world through Pace Gallery in Manhattan, which recently presented one of teamLab’s digital artworks that changed with the time of day and weather in New York, marking the group’s first solo exhibition in the city in 10 years. (Prices for teamLab’s screen-based works range from $120,000 to $400,000, and are purchased by collectors as well as institutions.) Their artworks are also represented by galleries such as Martin Browne Contemporary and Ikkan Art.

Part of what drives investors to teamLab is the company’s ability to draw an international crowd of tourists, whether in Tokyo or the immersive art space Superblue in Miami. There have even been copycats, such as the Museum of Dream Space in Los Angeles, which closed last year after a judge ruled in a copyright case that its installations were replicas of teamLab artworks.

Some critics have compared teamLab exhibitions to a sugar rush.

“You scurry away with your technicolor selfies without sustaining any prolonged emotional or critical relationship with the work,” said Ha, the culture critic, “and there’s really no reason to come back a second time.”

The new location in Abu Dhabi, teamLab Phenomena, will be only a short distance from outposts by the Guggenheim and Louvre. Inoko said the location will explore how the environment creates natural phenomena, a theme found in an earlier sculpture presented at an old canning factory in Osaka, where teamLab attempted to create a circular rainbow using the outdoor weather, sprayed mist and a ladder.

An Ambitious Plan for Global Expansion

Kudo, the teamLab executive, said that teamLab has almost 1,000 employees, but only a small group are devoted to creating artworks; the rest focus on running the locations and developing technology. Kudo said that most revenue was invested back into the production of new art. “We have very bad structure for our business,” Kudo said, “but we have good luck.”

Good luck — and wealthy investors, who have played a vital role in the company’s survival. TeamLab Planets, which opened in 2018, is partially underwritten by the e-commerce company DMM.com, which initially gained prominence in Japan as an online distributor of pornography but has since expanded its operations to mainstream online shopping, video, books and games. When it opened earlier this year, teamlab Borderless: Mori Building Digital Art Museum was founded with the Mori Building Company, Ltd., which also built the luxury development where the museum is based, in central Tokyo. TeamLab has also installed its artworks in a metro stations, a shopping mall, and a spa.

(Kudo declined to explain the financial structure of these deals, citing nondisclosure agreements.)

Its financial partnership with the Mori Building Company has allowed teamLab Borderless to churn out a stream of mirror rooms, light shows and installations with poetically mysterious names like “Cosmic Void” and “Frozen Transparency.” The first artwork that people encounter is a cascade of digital flowers. Around the viewer, trails of blossoms appear, bud, grow and wither, based on a computer program that responds to the environment in real time.

TeamLab distinguishes itself with this level of technological gadgetry from other immersive art companies, some of which have been criticized for simply looping animations of famous artworks onto the walls of empty rooms. While many of those venues have closed in recent years, others, like teamLab and the American company, Meow Wolf, have expanded.

A steady supply of investments has allowed teamLab to continue improving upon designs, Kudo said. From an application on his phone, he changes the colors of a room called “Infinite Crystal World” at teamLab Borderless, where thousands of LED lights are strung from the ceiling above a mirrored floor. It was the 12th version of the installation,which had been updated to create a better illusion of depth.

Elements cross into different art installations. Crows might circle through the falling flowers, only to glide into a nearby gallery of waterfalls.

Around the corner, hundreds of lights create a swirling, pulsating vortex of colors — the whirlpools that Inoko witnessed during childhood. A small text that accompanies the artwork “Chromatic Sphere” suggests that the flowing light has a philosophical subtext: “Existence is created, not with material presence or absence, but with order.”

Kudo translates these lofty themes into a singular ambition of teamLab’s to transform society into a freer place. “Most of the world is flat and fixed. But for us, it could be like a canvas,” he explained. “If we can put art in cities, then maybe we can put cities inside art.”

The Vast World of Art and Design

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• TeamLab’s Expanding Empire: During an economically challenging time for cultural institutions, the Japanese art collective has lured millions of visitors into its global network of perfectly Instagrammable, immersive art exhibitions.
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