teamLab Borderless
The New Digital Art Museum In Tokyo
The teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM left Odaiba island in August 2022 to move closer to the center of Tokyo. It reopened on 2024, August 9, in the new Azabudai Hills complex, achieved in November 2023 and located in the vicinity of the Tokyo Tower, in Minato ward. New immersive digital art experiences have been added to the usual animations.
In the end of 2023, two new skyscrapers complexes have been inaugurated a few hundred meters away from the Tokyo Tower 🗼: Azabudai Hills and Toranomon Hills. Their developer, Mori Building (also owner and headquartered at the neighboring Roppongi Hills), chose Azabudai Hills to host the new Tokyo teamLab Bordeless Museum, that opened on 2024, February 9. It was indeed relocated from Odaiba Island’s Palette Town, where it was first inaugurated in great fanfare in June 2018.
The 2,3 million of yearly visitors are now expected in this new 10,000m² space in the B1F basement floor of Azabudai Hills’ Plaza B. Its walls, floor and ceiling are used to display digital and interactive animations that immerse the viewers in a 3D dreamlike and limitless travel.
Visitors are offered a thorough exploration in immersion in the dark and successively mesmerized by each of the artworks in the various rooms. There is no fixed course: people can wander as they like, exploring all the installations, can go back and forth or visit the same room several times. Another benefit of the digital art museum’s new version is that all the rooms are on the same floor and therefore easier to access to persons with reduced mobility.
Original installations at Azabudai Hills’ Bordeless
In addition to the animations previously displayed in Odaiba, such as the remarkable En tea House, original installations have been created by the teamLab collective for this 2nd Borderless, such as:
- Bubble Universe (cover picture) and Microcosmose;
- Universe of Water Particles;
- Light Sculpture;
- Black Waves: Flowing Beyond Borders and the artworks Born in the Darkness, Return to the Darkness.
Overall, about 50 digital artworks form the exhibition, based on:
- Existing natural landscapes, such as waterfalls or seasonal blooming; and,
- The exploration of our cognitive perception, with plays on lights, colors and sounds that create interesting moving sculptures.
Some installations also include tangible elements such as surprising big marbles rolling on tracks, cubes and a forest of poles.
The artwork Sketch Ocean is primarily aimed at children. Visitors are invited to draw a marine creature that will then be integrated in the animation and shown on the ceiling and the walls of a room that becomes a fantasy aquarium.
An immersive experience that remains beautiful
Amateur photographers can make the most of the interactive animations to take beautiful artistic pictures (flash is however forbidden), while other visitors strike a pose in the colorful digital decors. Rooms that are too dark to provide a good picture are to be enjoyed without using a camera 📷 or a smartphone 📱.
This new digital art museum in Tokyo is totally on par with the successful former version, and immerses visitors in a visual and acoustic parallel world that seems endless. As Borderless is quite different from the teamLab Planets, whose temporary exhibition is scheduled until 2027, fans will truly enjoy visiting both places.