teamLab, “Morphing Continuum,” 2025. Sound by Hideaki Takahashi. (Courtesy Pace Gallery)
In January 2025, teamLab unveiled a significant expansion to its Tokyo museum, nearly doubling its area in order to accommodate even more immersive experiences. Now, only a few months later, the art collective has already announced its newest venture, which is slated to open this fall in Minami-ku, Kyoto, as part of the Kyoto Station Southeast Area Project.
Across several experimental artworks, many of which have previously been unreleased in Japan, Biovortex Kyoto focuses primarily on what teamLab calls “conventional notions of material substances” and how to transcend them. Visitors will plunge into everything from a sea of bubbles to an illuminated field, exploring the limits of their bodies in relation to concepts like mass, light, and time. Each space is activated through audience participation and directly challenges how, exactly, we choose to encounter and engage with art, especially at such a grand scale. The intended result, teamLab claims, is a “creative hub for generating and disseminating new value” in and around Kyoto.
Unlike some other projects by teamLab, Biovortex Kyoto integrates more physical rather than purely technological effects throughout its installations. Massless Amorphous Sculpture, for instance, is an exercise in ambiguity, permanence, and weight, all illustrated through soap bubbles. Here, bubbles are far from a mundane or unassuming presence, and instead ask visitors to bear witness to their movements depending on environmental input. At times, the bubble clouds break apart, dispersing through the air as smaller fragments. At other moments, the clouds are cohesive, bulbous, and almost monumental, showcasing how frequently a form can shift and change.
“Massless Amorphous Sculpture sustains its existence mid-air, having ambiguous boundaries,” teamLab says of the piece. “It is able to maintain its shape even when people immerse themselves physically into the sculpture, naturally restoring itself even if it breaks.”
Traces of Light, on the other hand, leans more into abstraction. The installation is an impressive light show, with colorful tendrils and webs responding to people walking around the exhibition. Without visitors, teamLab explains, “nothing exists other than the space, and nothing will ever be depicted.” In other words, the artwork relies upon the existence of others, much like the universe itself.
Alongside Traces of Light and Massless Amorphous Sculpture, Biovortex Kyoto will also feature Massless Suns and Dark Suns and Morphing Continuum, both of which also explore order, energy, and materiality. Additional installations included in the museum will be revealed in the coming months.
To learn more about Biovortex Kyoto and its opening this fall, visit the teamLab website.
This fall, teamLab will open Biovortex Kyoto, its newest museum full of immersive, experimental, and large-scale artwork.
teamLab, “Massless Amorphous Sculpture,” 2020. Sound by Hideaki Takahashi. (Courtesy Pace Gallery)
teamLab, “Massless Suns and Dark Suns,” 2022. Sound by Hideaki Takahashi. (Courtesy Pace Gallery)
Biovortex Kyoto will feature everything from a sea of bubbles to an illuminated field, exploring the limits of their bodies in relation to concepts like mass, light, and time.
teamLab, “Traces of Life,” 2025, from the series “Trails of Life: Transcending Space in All Directions.” Sound by Hideaki Takahashi. (Courtesy Pace Gallery)
teamLab, “Massless Amorphous Sculpture,” 2020. Sound by Hideaki Takahashi. (Courtesy Pace Gallery)
In the coming months, teamLab will announce additional installations that will be featured at Biovortex Kyoto.
teamLab, “Forest of Resonating Lamps.”
teamLab, “The Eternal Universe of Words.”
teamLab, “Resonating Microcosms,” in Beijing.
teamLab, “Living Crystallized Light,” in Abu Dhabi.
