TOKYO: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM – teamLab Borderless
If you asked me, where is the place that you must visit when travelling to Tokyo. Well, if you love art; if you love to take some instagrammable photos, if you explore and check out the most IN thing technology, I will suggest you to go to the Art Museum. Hah, don’t get me wrong, this is not some boring art museum where you see painting on the wall. This is an awesome art museum that has just opened its door in Summer 2018…
MORI building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: EPSON teamLab Borderless
“teamLab is an art collective, interdisciplinary group of ultratechnologists whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world. Various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects form teamLab.
teamLab aims to explore a new relationship between humans and nature, and between oneself and the world through art. Digital technology has allowed art to liberate itself from the physical and transcend boundaries. teamLab sees no boundary between humans and nature, and between oneself and the world; one is in the other and the other in one. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity of life.”
The museum is divided into a few sections: Borderless World, Athletic Forest, Future Park, Forest of Resonating Lamps and En Tea House.
This has got to be the most IN thing in the city. In short, it is equipped with beautiful lighting and colours that change every second, and with motion of motives running around the area along with the relaxing background music.
It is advisable to be there as early as possible as we were informed by friends that the art museum is always crowded and one of our friends actually queue for 3 hours just to enter the museum! Okay, this post gotta be packed with photos. I hope you guys will enjoy reading this.
It was the typhoon day itself and we braved ourselves to this digital art museum in Odaiba early in the morning. There were already quite a number of people ahead us. We bought our ticket online, priced at ¥ 3,200 (it is in Japanese, maybe there is English version but you may have to search, sorry ya.) and given with the confirmation email and ticket QR code. We queued and got our ticket scanned.
As we entered the area, we got a bit lost. Slowly, we searched around and … continued to take photos everywhere in the Forest of Flowers and People. The walls and floors and the mirrors were swirling with floral, endlessly. We first saw Himawari (sunflower) and got very excited and then peonies and roses and hydrangeas and many many more. The flowers will change according to season, as well as time. Love flowers? Make your visit here!
TIPS: use the mirror wisely as it will give a unique reflection in your photos.
Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where people Gather, seeing droplets of “water” from the waterfall, splashing onto the objects such as ground or you!
Another instagrammable spot is the Crystal World, playing round with LED lights and colours. We spared a bit of time mesmerizing the beauty of this art. To be honest, it was very difficult to get a nice human-less shot here as this area was very crowded. We’d wondered how the others could manage very nice instagrammable photos. Perhaps, we do not have good skill in that.
Forest of Resonating Lamp, is a space that adapts and changes when there is movement of people in it. Understand this piece of art more over here. You will have to queue to enter this area. The duration per stay and people in this room is limited on each session. We queued for about 30 minutes and we had to use our ninja skill for some photos as we were given only like, 2 minutes inside this area. Of course, if you wanna spare more time here, just queue again to enter.
In En Tea House, you will be able to taste the traditional matcha tea in a twist with digital art showing the flowers blooming inside the teacup. There are four types of tea available, priced at ¥500 each and ¥200 for each refill. I picked the hot Roasted Green Tea with Camomile Latte while WenChing picked the cold Green Tea with Yuzu.
We were leaded to our seats, in the dark; took a break after the long photography session while waiting for our bowl of tea. The staff then came by with our tea and slowly, you will be able to get the flowers bloom in the tea!
Impressive! There were petals fallen off once we lifted our bowl, and soon, the flowered bloomed again in the tea bowl once we put it down. The colour changes according to you tea too! we both got different flowers bloomed in the bowl. And I highly recommended the green tea chamomile latte I had. It was very aromatic and packed with green tea flavour but not overly creamy !
“The tea in the bowl becomes and infinite world in which the flowers continue to bloom”.
As long as there is tea in the bowl, the flowers bloom!
In Future Park, you can learn and play. It is an amusement park where you can enjoy the world creativity and freely with others. WenChing and I wished that we had more time, so that we could sit down to paint our arts and have it posted on the wall. We saw many art pieces, very creatively painted and projected it on the Sketch Aquarium.
Here is also another area with the gigantic beautiful whales “swimming” around. I found myself ‘peace’ seeing the whales waving at me. I think I could zen here all day long.
Athletic Forest allows you to have some physical stretch and work out; and allows you to immerse your body in an interactive world in this 3D space. It trains spatial recognition ability by promoting the growth of hippocampus of the brain too!
There is even a trampoline that filled with galaxy colours in the Multi Jumping Universe!
Climbing through the Light ForestThree Dimensional bouldering
We also had fun in this Inverted Globe, Giant Connecting Block Town; looks like it is a playland for kids but not really. I find it interesting; seeing accommodation and transport changing route and path.
Do spare some time to explore this Digital Art Museum, I can assure it will make you ohh-ing and ahh-ing the whole session. There are actually more installations around but we were running out of time to explore them. We will definitely be back again. Also, according to WenChing, this digital art museum is three times bigger than the one in Singapore. If you are keen to be here, do spare more time. One can simply zen whole day inside the art museum. Do take note that there isn’t any food available for sales inside the premise; remember to fuel up yourself before entering the premise.
Getting here:
By monorail:
Tokyo Teleport Station (Rinkai Line)
Aomi Station (Yurikamome Line)
5 mins walk toward big wheel.
MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless
Odaiba Palette Town, 1-3-8 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
