Art & Exhibitions
Continuing Its Takeover of Asia, teamLab Is Opening a ‘Body Immersive’ Museum at Luxury Casino and Resort in Macau
After postponing its New York museum indefinitely, teamLab has new plans.
After postponing its New York museum indefinitely, teamLab has new plans.
Sarah Cascone ShareShare This Article
The next big immersive art installation by the digital art collective teamLab is scheduled to open in a luxury hotel and casino in Macau early next year.
The upcoming “museum,” which will be at the Venetian Macao resort, was announced on teamLab’s Instagram earlier this week and described as a 15,000-square-foot, “body immersive” experience with “cavernous ceilings” and new works of art. The space is scheduled to open in January 2020, following the debut of another teamLab project that will open in Shanghai on November 5.
The first permanent teamLab space, teamLab Borderless, opened in Toyko in July 2018. In the first year alone, 2.3 million people visited the exhibition, surpassing annual attendance at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and making it the most popular single-artist museum in the world. A second temporary show in Tokyo, teamLab Planets, has also been a hit.
The group had also planned to open a permanent space in Brooklyn in a 55,000-square-foot former warehouse, in which barefoot visitors would move through light and water installations. But after signing an 11-year lease, the group abruptly and indefinitely put the plan on hold in August, citing the need to “rethink our strategy for entering the American market.”
Elswhere in the US, viewers can still see work by the collective at Seattle’s Living Computers Museum + Lab, which opens next month, and at Los Angeles’s long-delayed Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, when it opens next year.
Other upcoming teamLab shows include outings at Kochi Castle in Japan and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Museum hours and admission prices for the Macau venture are still to be announced.
The collective, made up of computer programmers, animators, engineers, designers, mathematicians, and architects, works at the intersection of art, science, technology, design, and commerce. The group is represented by Pace Gallery.