Shanghai TeamLab Borderless Museum
Today, I took my kids to the Shanghai #teamLabBorderless Museum. Most people I know in Shanghai have already visited and seen the amazing digital artworks in the museum since its opening on November 5, 2019. But I still want to bring it up, in case you haven’t heard about it, or haven’t been to one of the #teamLabBorderless exhibitions around the world. If you already have been to one of their exhibitions, I would also like to open up a discussion on the impact and influence of how the teamLab creations have rocked and changed the way we see and experience art.
A condensed description of what teamLab is from Wikipedia: teamLab is an international art collective, an interdisciplinary group of artists formed in 2001 in Tokyo, Japan. The group consists of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects who refer to themselves as “ultra-technologists". TeamLab creates digital artwork which is based on the concept of borderless, and integrates advanced technologies. It made its debut exhibition at the KaiKaiKiki Gallery in Taipei, then subsequently around the world. In 2014, the NewYork PACEGallery began to help promote TeamLab’s work. The first #teamLabBorderless digital museum opened in June 2018 in Tokyo, Japan; the second museum opened in Shanghai in November 2019.
TeamLab exhibitions have shown us how to bring people in this digital age together across all ages and cultures to enjoy a collective of interdisciplinary artworks inside a new type of museum space. The strong visual digital images and colors can be placed anywhere: on the wall, ceilings, chairs, floors, and even on the visitors’ bodies and faces! Any images can be mixed with the unthinkable and the impossible, and be projected in the spaces around the visitors at any speed and color density and clarity. So the spaces can become any virtual reality or dreamlands. These visual effects can be physically so stimulating that it is not possible to be achieved by most traditional mediums. It can also achieve great commercial success because not only can it feel like a fun digital lightshow or part of an amusement park, it can also take us to some fascinating wonderlands where previously only existed within our imaginations or movies. If I have to sum up in one phrase my experience at the exhibition, it would be: it felt like I was walking inside a kaleidoscope. What’s your take?
Photos by Irene Chang Studio