Japan's Kaleidoscopic New Digital-Only Art Museum Is Your Next Reason to Visit Tokyo
Featuring a forest filled with lamps that respond to human interaction and a virtual tea party that pairs your hot beverage with digital blooming flowers.
Tokyo might be filled with dotty creations thanks to its Yayoi Kusama museum, not to mention gorgeous animation at its Studio Ghibli museum; however that's just the beginning of the Japanese capital's immersive creativity. From June 21, it'll become home to a new digital art museum — the city's first, and one that'll dedicate its more than 10,000-square-metre space to interactive, kaleidoscopic artistry.
While one-off Tokyo events have combined multi-course dinners with multi-sensory projections and turned a greenhouse into a light and music-filled garden patch, Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless will offer up those kind of attractions all year round. In fact, it's a collaboration between interdisciplinary art collective teamLab, aka the folks responsible for the aforementioned animated meal, and urban developer Mori Building, whose sky-high gallery in the city's Roppongi district hosted a giant game of Space Invaders 52 storeys above the ground last year.
Set to feature more than 50 works, the museum will be split into five different areas — but, as the site's name indicates, there won't be any walls or borders between each space. Instead, visitors will roam from through a gallery where art works blend into each other, communicate with each other, move across installation rooms and even fuse with other pieces.
Highlights include installations that'll make you feel like you're wandering through lily pads, sliding through fruit and sitting in an aquarium; a tea party that pairs real-life cuppas with virtually blooming flowers; and a forest of lamps that respond to human interaction, spreading their light as people approach each bulb. Still on the garden theme, the museum will also feature an 'athletics forest' complete with spaces for jumping, hanging on swinging bars, navigating a weightless space and climbing on gradients of different elevations, bridging the gap between the artistic and the physical.
Plus, the site is located in Odaiba — which means travelling over the city's famous Rainbow Bridge to get there, and adding some extra brightness to your visit.
Due to open on June 21, the museum will operate seven days a week, all year round.
For more information, visit the Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless website.
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