OSAKA, JAPAN-- November 08, 2022 -- teamLab Botanical Garden Osaka is a botanical garden by day, and an art space by night, created by the Tokyo-based art collective teamLab, known for their record-breaking museum teamLab Borderless. Unveiled over the summer at Nagai Botanical Garden in Osaka, teamLab Botanical Garden is the collective’s latest permanent open-air museum that begins to glow as the sun sets.
Stretching over an area of 240,000-sqm with a large lake at its center, Nagai Botanical Garden is home to numerous wild bird species and seasonal flora. The artworks emerge and are shaped by the garden’s plants, trees, and the birds that inhabit the area, as teamLab incorporates these natural elements through the use of non-material digital technologies - sensing, networks, light, and sound. The works transform interactively, influenced by the wind, rain, as well as by the presence of visitors.
teamLab Botanical Garden has unveiled several new works by teamLab including Sculptures of Dissipative Birds in the Wind, a giant installation that depicts the movement, or energy dissipated, by the surrounding wind and flying birds in real time, which in turn creates an artwork that perpetually changes in real time.
The exhibition, which changes in scenery with the seasons, also features works that incorporate the seasonal flora. For the month of November, a seasonal exhibit that uses living cosmos flowers, Life is Flickering Light Floating in the Dark - Cosmos, is on view. Across a 2,000-sqm expansive field, the cosmos emerge from the dark as they shine. When people stand still close to the cosmos, they shine brightly and produce a tone. The light then radiates out, spreading to nearby cosmos as they resonate with the same tone.
“As the artworks in this exhibition are influenced by the trees and birds that live in the garden, if the wildlife disappear, the artworks will also disappear. The trees and birds cannot be separated from the ecosystem such as the garden’s forest or lake, so if the environment is not sustained, the trees and birds will cease to exist, and as a consequence, the artworks as well. The artworks’ existence is not defined by their physical surface boundaries, but is continuous and ambiguous with its surrounding environment.
The artworks transform interactively, influenced by wind, rain, and as well as by the behavior of the people in it, making the environment and the people a part of the works. The people and the artworks, the trees, the forest and the lake, the ecosystem and the environment, all form a continuity without boundaries.
teamLab aims to explore a space where human perception expands from the artwork itself to the environment,” says teamLab.
