Installations are high-concept enough for deep-thinkers, beautiful enough for anyone to enjoy.

With the amazing art installations of Japan’s TeamLab being a consistent hit with travelers and Kyoto being one of the country’s top tourism destinations, it’s surprising that the organization hasn’t had a permanent venue in the city. That’ll be changing soon, though, with the opening of TeamLab Biovortex Kyoto.

TeamLab Biovortex Kyoto is part of the redevelopment project for the neighborhood on the south side of Kyoto Station, a section of the city that’s short on historical sites and other tourism attractions compared to the rest of Kyoto. TeamLab is billing the venue as an immersive art museum, and the exhibits combine the group’s expertise in digital creations with interactive elements to give visitors the opportunity to walk through what feels like an entirely different, and entirely beautiful, world.

Best embodying this is ironically, the non-corporeal Massless Amorphous Sculpture, which TeamLab describes as an immense bubble sculpture “transcending the very concept of mass,” adding:

“The contours of its existence are ambiguous—it fragments into smaller pieces, but merges into a larger mass. Even when people fully immerse themselves in this sculpture, its existence remains intact. If broken by people, it naturally restores itself.”

That’s not the only “massless” exhibit at the museum, though, which will also house Massless Suns and Dark Suns. As a work of art made of light, TeamLab says that there exists no clear boundary between the artwork and its observer, who can affect the location and intensity of the lights by reaching out towards the orbs.

Morphing Continuum is what TeamLab refers to as a “high order sculpture,” a work of art that is generated by phenomena present in its unique environment. As with the Massless Amorphous Sculpture, the artwork remains intact even as people move through it, and TeamLab asserts that the baseline structural order allows its nonconnected individual elements to form a single element that “transcend[s] space and time.”

Transcendence is also a theme of the last so-far previewed installation, Traces of Life, in which the footsteps of visitors walking barefoot through a pool of water leave traces of light that form into trails and create sights that can only be seen because of the people within the art space.

Or, if all that conceptual pontificating is enough to make your head spin or your eyelids heavy, there’s nothing wrong with appreciating how, regardless of what they’re attempting to represent, each of the installations is very, very pretty.

TeamLab Biovortex Kyoto is scheduled to open this fall.

Source: PR Times, TeamLab
Top image: PR Times
Insert images: PR Times, TeamLab
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[ Read in Japanese ]