The blessings and threats of nature, as well as the blessings and threats of civilization, are continuous. There is no single source of absolute malice, nor can it all be dismissed idealistically. There are no simple answers, and at times it is difficult to process our emotions. Even so, we want to affirm life in all aspects. Life is beautiful.<br><br>teamLab has been working on the Spatial Calligraphy series since the collective formed. Spatial Calligraphy offers a contemporary interpretation of traditional Japanese <span style="font-style: italic">sho</span> (calligraphy) in an abstract space. It reconstructs Japanese <span style="font-style: italic">sho</span> in three-dimensional space and expresses the depth, speed, and power of the brushstroke. Butterflies, birds, animals, plants, and flowers appear from the calligraphy expressing the passing of the seasons. According to Zen Buddhist writing, &ldquo;In all living things Buddha nature dwells.&rdquo; All things are impermanent and the natural appearance of things is the Buddha nature. What we put into shape is that which we, the living, think is the heart of life.

Ultrasubjective Space

Dreaming Together

Throughout Time: The Sense of Beauty

Hello from Japan!

The Art of ZEN: From Mind to Form

KENPOKU ART 2016 Special Exhibition "teamLab: Infinity of Flowers inside Small Things"

First Look: Collecting Contemporary at the Asian

teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World

Yoruume Matsuri

Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab

Tradition and Innovation - Digital Art by teamLab

teamLab and Saga Merry-go-round Exhibition

teamLab Dance! Art Exhibition and Learn and Play! teamLab Future Park

ZIPANGU Akita

ZIPANGU Hachinohe

Towada Art Center 5th Anniversary Exhibition 「flowers」

ZIPANGU Takasaki

ZIPANGU Niigata

teamLab exhibition "We are the Future"

Future Pass

First session of the year 2012, the Tokyo Stock Exchange

VIVA JAPAN CAFE

TOKYO DESIGNERS WEEK 2011

TARO LOVE Exhibition ～Taro Okamoto ＆ 14 Human Genes～

JALAPAGOS

Love Letter Project '11

VOLTA7

Future Pass - From Asia to the World Collaterala Event of the 54th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezi

ART HK

teamLab "LIVE!"

47 Bunka Program

<div><b>ほのぼの笑いの集い 11/20まで　茨城県北芸術祭（KENPOKU）</b></div><div>「ＫＥＮＰＯＫＵ」の愛称で親しまれる茨城県北芸術祭が、同県北部の日立市など６市町を会場に開かれている。地域活性化という社会的課題に文化の力でどう取り組むのか、文化プログラムとしての成果が期待される。（Excerpt from the text）</div>

ほのぼの笑いの集い 11/20まで　茨城県北芸術祭（KENPOKU）

The Tokushima Economy

田村：私がチームラボのさくひんに興味を持ったのは、東京スカイツリーの１階に描かれた巨大な「墨田川デジタル絵巻」を見てからです。（Excerpt from the text）

徳島の街や自然をそのままアートに

RETRIP

<div><b>世界が注目する最先端アート！“チームラボ”の全国のイベント10選</b></div><div>2001年3月に創業したウルトラテクノロジー集団「チームラボ」。最先端テクノロジーの研究から、Webのプロデュース、システムインテグレーション、マーケティングテクノロジー、アートまで幅広く活動を行っています。そんなチームラボが全国で開催しているイベントや常設展をまとめてご紹介します。</div><div>（Excerpt from the text）</div>

世界が注目する最先端アート！“チームラボ”の全国のイベント10選

Time Out

<div><b>チームラボ「生命は生命の力で生きている」</b></div><div>「ウルトラテクノロジスト集団」チームラボの新作『生命は生命の力で生きている』が、東京国立博物館で展示されている。同作は、東博で現在開催中の『臨済禅師1150年・白隠禅師250年遠諱記念　特別展「禅―心をかたちに―」』とのコラボレーション作品だ。（Excerpt from the text）</div>

チームラボ「生命は生命の力で生きている」

FASHION PRESS

<div><b>チームラボが“禅”のデジタルアートを東京国立博物館の特別展で発表 - 生きることを全肯定した作品</b></div><div>チームラボが、東京国立博物館で開催される特別展「禅―心をかたちに―」の会場でデジタルアート作品「生命は生命の力で生きている」を公開する。会期は、2016年10月18日(火)から11月27日(日)まで。（Excerpt from the text）</div>

チームラボが“禅”のデジタルアートを東京国立博物館の特別展で発表 - 生きることを全肯定した作品

Mens Studio　

<div><b>[ #茨城県北芸術祭 2016] チームラボの魅力ある7作品が凄い！茨城県天心記念五浦美術館【PR】</b></div><div>茨城県北芸術祭2016に行ったレポートの続きです。関連記事としてはこれで7記事目となります。さて、芸術祭のダイジェストバスツアー（海コース）で訪れる6番目の場所。それが北茨城市の「茨城県天心記念五浦美術館」です！「五浦」（いづら）と読みます。 （Excerpt from the text）</div>

[ #茨城県北芸術祭 2016] チームラボの魅力ある7作品が凄い！茨城県天心記念五浦美術館【PR】

The Boston Globe

<p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><div><ul><li><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p>CAMBRIDGE — Thanks to its many innovative research institutions and to the long-term contributions of organizations like Boston CyberArts, this city is a great place to see interactive, projection-based art.</p><p>October has been especially rich for this kind of work. The second annual Illuminus festival — a spectacular laser and light show organized by Jeff Granz — was held on Lansdowne Street, as part of HUBweek, on the night of Oct. 10. A week later, Joseph Ketner of Emerson College organized “Electric Pilgrims,” a group show featuring outdoor projections on building facades and TV screens set up on Channel Center Street in South Boston.</p><p>Both events had to contend with the weather and were limited to one night. That’s not the case with “Parallax,” Shahzia Sikander’s ravishing&nbsp;<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2015/10/01/sikander-animated-art-evokes-worlds-uncertainty/t1Knas56fSnEcmaJSnxYjN/story.html">animated projection</a>&nbsp;at Tufts University Art Gallery, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Nor is it the case with a new show at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. Both are indoors, and ongoing.</p><p>Called “What a Loving and Beautiful World,” the Radcliffe show is in the new Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall. It is immersive, interactive, and genuinely entrancing.</p><p>It’s by teamLab, a large consortium of artists, programmers, engineers, computer graphics animators, mathematicians, and graphic designers, formed in 2001 and based in Tokyo.</p><p>There are three parts to teamLab’s display at the Radcliffe Institute (which, by the way, has an impressively ambitious art program). The biggest and most memorable is a video installation in a room you walk into, and then have a hard time leaving — it’s that engrossing.</p><p>Calligraphic characters, in both Japanese and Chinese script, descend slowly from the low ceiling. Reach out toward them and they shrink away, before transforming into the thing they connote. The character for “mountains,” for instance, turns into animated imagery of a mountain range; the same for snow, rain, and so on.</p><div><p>The biggest and most interactive portion of the show surrounds visitors.</p></div><p>The imagery, traditional in appearance (which is to say painted with brush and ink), spreads magically and seemingly spontaneously across the gallery’s three walls. Bare winter branches alternate with birds in flight, butterflies, and floating flower petals.</p><p>A rainbow appears, then slanting rain, then snow — or the same, but in a different order. Dark, inky effusions contrast with a splendidly isolated moon, a sun, mountains and waves, a blue dawn, an enflamed sunset.</p><p>The writing was executed by a professional calligrapher who goes by the name Sisyu. The work’s conception is attributed to her and to teamLab. The accompanying soundtrack, the kind of atmospheric but essentially flavorless music you hear while getting a back massage, is by Hideaki Takahashi.</p><p>It’s hard to explain how charming and at times transporting the work is. The interactive conceit — your awareness that the imagery is responding to the willed movements of your and your fellow viewers’ arms — is tempered by a wondrous sense of words and pictures appearing and spreading in ways beyond your control.</p><p>You lift your arm to make something happen, but a second later, some other image swells across the screen as a result of someone else’s actions. The whole thing feels likably democratic. Yet compositionally, the visuals never feel crowded or chaotic.</p><p>As in traditional Asian art, there is a beautiful tension between emptiness and fullness, and between elements that splinter and those that cohere.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Outside this main gallery are wall-mounted screens showing two more works, both featuring calligraphy by Sisyu, animated and ornamented by her teamLab colleagues. One called “Life Survives by the Power of Life” is a six-minute digital animation that begins, hypnotically, with pooling black ink marks appearing out of nowhere on a light, inchoate ground.</p><p>The marks morph magically into bare branches, which are soon covered with snow, all in a slowly rotating three-dimensional space. Gradually, the snow melts and is replaced by buds, leaves, flowers, and a profusion of life — “weeds in wheels” shooting “long and lovely and lush,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it in “Spring.”</p><p>The second, “Cold Life,” began as a kind of peeling away of the virtual surface of the previous work, so that we see its computer graphics “bones,” so to speak: wireframe models with dense abstracted data rendered in three dimensions, in a dominant palette of electric blue.</p><p>The imagery in all three teamLab works feels clichéd and sentimental, while its stated themes — nature and humanity — are perhaps unhelpfully vague. But somehow, the mash-up of traditional and new, handmade and high tech, pulls you in, and you succumb to these works’ inner logic.</p><p>Bring kids, if you can. They will love it.</p><p><strong><em>Art Review</em></strong></p><p><strong>TEAMLAB AT RADCLIFFE: What a Loving and Beautiful World</strong></p><p>At Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, Radcliffe Yard, Harvard University, through Nov. 14. 617-496-1153, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.radcliffe">www.radcliffe</a></p><p>.harvard.edu/event/2015-teamlab-exhibition</p></div></li></ul></div><div></div></div></div>

Japanese collective teamLab enchants at Radcliffe

Boston Magazine

<p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><div><ul><li><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p>There’s a clear, unspoken rule enforced in most museum and gallery settings: Don’t touch the art.</p><p>But currently, that’s not the case inside the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where a new exhibition is very much dependent on visitors’ touch.</p><p>Titled “teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World,” the interactive exhibition features projections of Chinese and Japanese characters that represent elements from the natural world and cascade down the walls of the gallery. When activated by touch, the characters trigger images of their meanings, as well as sounds, to emerge.</p><p>As they’re triggered around the space by multiple people, the images can also interact with each other, constantly creating new animated environments that cannot be repeated.<br><br>TeamLab, the group from Japan that created the digital artwork, is an interdisciplinary consortium that consists of artists, programmers, engineers, animators, mathematicians, architects, and designers. Their multimedia installations have appeared around the world, rendering dreamlike, responsive&nbsp;environments such as a&nbsp;<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/floating-flower-garden-tokyo">floating flower garden</a>&nbsp;and a&nbsp;<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/08/18/arts/openings-in-tokyo/teamlab-exhibition-walk-crystal-universe/#.VielpRCrRXE">cosmos-like space</a>&nbsp;filled with thousands of LEDs that give visitors the illusion of standing among stars.</p><p>For the exhibition at Radcliffe, teamLab collaborated with professional calligrapher Sisyu and musician Hideaki Takahashi. It’s the inaugural show at the&nbsp;Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, which was recently&nbsp;<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/09/faust-and-cohen-mark-new-12-5m-fund-for-arts/">redesigned and renamed</a>&nbsp;following a gift from Harvard alum Maryellie Kulukundis Johnson and her husband Rupert H. Johnson Jr.</p><p><em>“teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World” is free and open to the public Mondays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m., through November 14 at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery of Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Radcliffe Yard, Cambridge. For more info, visit<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2015-teamlab-exhibition">radcliffe.harvard.edu</a>.</em></p></div></li></ul></div><div></div></div></div>

Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute Displays a Touch-Sensitive Digital Artwork

The Harvard Crimson

<p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><div><ul><li><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p>“Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end,” art critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1990. Hughes lamented creative production’s submission to the immaterial, to the mind-numbing spectacle of television. Yet 25 years later, even with the advent of the internet and the further absorption of everyday experience into the disembodied realm of the digital, the contemporary Japanese artistic collective teamLab sets out to push the bounds of media art.</p><p>teamLab, whose multimedia installation “What a Loving and Beautiful World” opened at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on Friday, Oct. 16, engages with this question of the expressive potential of digital media. In the installation space, Japanese characters float on gallery walls rendered luminous veils of color by light projections. When the viewer reaches out to touch a character, the symbol transforms into the image it represents: Silver waves ripple out from the point of contact with the character for “sea,” and pink cherry blossoms burst from the character for “flower.” As more visitors enter the space, images whirl across the walls, then subside. Within the installation, the boundaries between text and image, nature and culture, spectator and actor are constantly in flux.</p><p>Through digital media, teamLab’s artists, calligraphers, programmers, and engineers create a participatory visual environment that is both playful and meditative. “teamLab demonstrates what is possible when people with different kinds of expertise—in the arts, engineering, computer science, robotics, architecture, different areas of design—come together to solve artistic problems,” writes Yukio Lippit, professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard and the exhibition’s curator, in an email.</p><p>Meg Rotzel, the Radcliffe Institute’s Arts Program Manager and a practicing artist, believes that the immersivity of teamLab’s installation renders it uniquely compelling. “I’m happiest when I’m really in my work, when I’m thinking and making simultaneously,” she says. “When I go to a museum, normally I feel like I’m here and the work of art is there, and there’s a separation. But with ‘What a Loving and Beautiful World,’ you can see whole groups of people just playing in the art, within the space of the work of art.”</p><p>Hughes feared the passivity enforced by media spectacle, but teamLab uses digital media to invite the viewer to participate in the art’s making. The gallery acts as a canvas upon which the viewer inscribes his or her curiosity. Because the animation responds to the actions of viewers, the possibilities for visual variation are endless: The installation will never look the same twice. Lippit says that he appreciates the work’s capacity to give visible form to the viewer’s thoughts. “I really enjoy standing in the room and doing nothing. Somehow, the work responds,” he writes. “In theory it is supposed to be interactive and ‘triggered’ by the movements of viewers, but the installation somehow takes on new moods and can quicken its metabolism even if one does nothing, generating an uncanny sensation. It is like a mindscape.”</p><p>Within the dreamlike gallery space, teamLab weaves together calligraphy and computer-generated images, the expressive gesture of the artist’s hand and the pixel, traditional artistic practice and modern digital technology. Melissa McCormick, Harvard professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Lippit’s wife, says that teamLab’s work engages with both the conditions of contemporary life and with artistic precedent. “Traditional Japanese painting is radical by many standards: It uses a multidimensional and shifting perspective, [it] folds time into spatial representation, and its formats are immersive and anticipate the movement and touch of the viewer,” McCormick writes in an email. “These are all things that have come to characterize digital art made in our current age…but teamLab’s work emphasizes their connection to art in the past and encourages new ways of thinking about links between the science of perception, consciousness, and artistic representation.”</p><p>She adds that teamLab’s work has resonance beyond the field of art history. “It would be hard to find a better example of the kind of visually stunning and even poignant results that can emerge through an integration of art and science, something in which many on this campus are thoroughly engaged,” she writes.</p><p>Lippit also emphasizes the potential of the work to broaden students’ experience of the arts. “It is not often that Harvard exhibits contemporary artists from Japan or Asia, and the exhibition expands the purview of the arts featured here,” he writes.</p><p>The installation “What a Loving and Beautiful World” will be on view in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall in Radcliffe Yard until Nov. 14.</p></div></li></ul></div><div></div></div></div>

'What a Loving and Beautiful World' Brings Digital Art to Radcliffe

HARVARD gazette

<p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><div><ul><li><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><p>What’s it like to walk into a living dream, one you can control with a wave of your hand? To find out, stop by Radcliffe’s redesigned Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall, where the interactive installation “teamLab at Radcliffe: What a Loving and Beautiful World” transforms the viewer into virtual artist.</p><p>Behind a black curtain, a vivid dreamscape springs to life as visitors pass their hands in front of projected Chinese and Japanese characters that cascade down the gallery’s walls and vanish into the floor.</p><p>Move a hand in front of the character for butterfly and the character disappears, replaced by a burst of brilliant insects fluttering on the wall. Pass your hand over the character for lightning and the gallery explodes in jagged flashes of white.</p><p>As multiple visitors move through the space, the images they trigger interact with one another, creating a unique environment every few seconds. Each image has its own acoustic signature, so viewers are also virtual composers who generate an ever-changing world of sound.</p><p>The gallery has been transformed into something “entirely unpredictable” said Yukio Lippit, the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at Radcliffe and a professor of the history of art and architecture, who was instrumental in bringing the show to Harvard.</p><p>Visitors, he said, will be surprised by “the degree to which they have agency in shaping this world, in interacting with it, in triggering its various mechanisms and effects to create something new.”</p><p>The brain behind the new design is teamLab, a Japan-based consortium of designers, engineers, architects, artists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and specialists in 3-D modeling who use technology to expand the boundaries of art and creativity. For the Radcliffe show, the group used characters by the Japanese calligrapher Sisyu that represent the natural world, and music by Hideaki Takahashi.</p><p>In Cambridge last week for the gallery opening, Toshiyuki Inoko, teamLab’s founder, discussed through an interpreter the genesis of the project, his vision for the work, and the importance of having its U.S. debut at Harvard.</p><p>Created in 2001 with five members, teamLab now numbers more than 400, all of whom share the belief, said Inoko, “that digital technology can expand the expressive boundaries of art.”</p><p>Inoko, an engineer by training, said art has been as important as science in the history and development of human perception. Taken together, the disciplines can help reconnect people to their physical surroundings and to one another, he said, adding that he worries that such connections are increasingly scarce in today’s hyper-connected digital world.</p><p>“In the pre-modern world, life was based in community,” said Inoko, “one understood that one’s actions were mutually interactive and consequential in profound ways. And so the interactivity of the installation is meant to evoke a kind of resonance with one another and the world, which has been lost.”</p><p>Bringing the installation to Radcliffe has been a good fit for teamLab, whose collaborative nature, Inoko said, resembles Radcliffe’s operating ethos, one that encourages interdisciplinary engagement among its fellows and visiting scholars.</p><p>“To fully explore the potential of this realm one has to work collaboratively. The digital realm is very complex, and the boundaries that separate what I am calling creativity and technology are actually thoroughly blurred.</p><p>“We come together to work out problems and think of solutions, using our combined expertise to solve problems,” he continued. “And that process is very important because it leads to the generation of knowledge and small intellectual discoveries that are then folded back into the process. … So being able to showcase our work in an interdisciplinary environment such as this one is highly meaningful.”</p><p>Lippit agreed, adding that the installation can help show Harvard students what’s possible when various disciplines work together.</p><p>“I think this offers one kind of ideal model of collaboration.”</p></div></li></ul></div><div></div></div></div>

For gallery visitors, a chance to be one with the art

Harvard University

<h1>teamLab brings interactive art to Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute</h1><p></p>

teamLab brings interactive art to Harvard's Radcliffe Institute

ニューヨークで鑑賞する新しい日本美術。「異形の楽園」展。

<p>同時代に生きるアーティストの作品を鑑賞することは、自分の生きている世界について新たな視点を与えてくれることのような気がします。日本美術というカテゴリーは、そのテーマやモチーフ、歴史背景などから日本人であっても、逆に馴染みが薄い人も多いかもしれません。今月ニューヨークのジャパン・ソサエティーで始まった展覧会は日本美術に対する既成概念をいい意味で覆してくれました。</p><p>今回の企画「異形の楽園：池田学、天明屋尚、チームラボ」は1960年代後半以降に生まれたアーティストたちの作品を展示しています。ギャラリー館長の手塚美和子氏によれば「この3作家は、ペン、ペイント、さらにはソフトウェア等、それぞれが違うツールを使いながら、自分達の良さを最大限に引き出し、見るものを異次元の幻想的な世界へと導きます」と説明しています。</p><p>展覧会場はまず、池田学が製作した12点の作品に迎えられます。入口で配布された虫眼鏡で拡大して見なくてはならないほどに細密に描かれた作品の数々。</p><p>ハイライトは2008年に製作された「予兆」という作品です。4枚のパネルによって構成された大きな波をモチーフとしたもので、高層ビルや車、人などを巻きみながらうねりをあげるその様子は3.11の大津波を連想させる、というので震災後は展示が自粛されていたとか。今回は日本国外での初公開、さらに震災後初の一般公開となるそうです。</p><p>1点を完成させるまでには何年もの時間を要するそうで、全体の下絵を描いてから仕上げるのでなく、一部分ずつ描き込みながら、パーツを広げていくという方法をとっているのだそうです。</p><p>次のルームはチームラボによる展示です。彼らは2001年に設立されたグループで、日本のスティーブ・ジョブスとも称される猪子寿之のもと、アーティストやプログラムエンジニア、建築家、数学者、アニメーターなど多彩なクリエーター300人以上による大所帯です。日本の古典美術をテーマにしたデジタルアートを製作し、最近ではニューヨークのペースギャラリーでも展覧会を開催しました。</p><p>今回は江戸時代の奇想画家として知られる伊藤若冲による「鳥獣花木図屏風」をリソースとした大きなモニターの作品などを展示しています。８枚のパネルにはカラフルな花園に象や鳥など動物たちが映っており、鑑賞者が近づくと画面が反応する、というインタラクティブな作品となっています。ほか、今回の展覧会のために製作された「Flowers and People―Gold and Dark」という作品は部屋全体にフローラルパターンが投影されており、壁や床に触れることによって開花したり、散ったりといった植物の一生と対話できるような作品となっています。</p><p>そして展覧会最後は天明屋尚による初の大型インスタレーション「韻」が設置されています。レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチやミケランジェロなどルネッサンス時代の巨匠たちが描いたバトルシーンにも影響を受けたというこの作品は1対になった２枚の絵と、真っ赤な砂による枯山水の庭で構成されています。ミラーイメージのように反転した状態の絵は、実はどちらかがコピー（デジタルプリント）。鑑賞者の目利きぶりを試される、かのような作品でもあります。アーティストいわく現代の“和魂洋才”的手法によって製作されたこの作品、全員全く同じ風貌の兵士たちはふんどし姿に艶やかな黒髪に滑らかな肌が特徴。ある意味で肉体のリアリティがなく、フィギュアが描かれているようにも感じました。</p><p>制作方法もメディアも、そしてコンセプトも、ほんとうに三種三様の作品。でもどれも日本美術の“現在”、そして私たちの住む世界の今を象徴しているといっていいでしょう。ニューヨークで鑑賞する新しい日本美術。今、お薦めの展覧会です。</p><p>Garden of Unearthy Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya &amp; teamLab<br>異形の楽園：池田学、天明屋尚、チームラボ （2015年1月11日まで）<br>Japan Society / 333 East 47th St. New York<br>Tel: 212-832-1155<br><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.japansociety.org/">www.japansociety.org</a></p>

J-COLLABO.ORG

– What is the concept and highlights of the current exhibition at Japan Society in New York?<br><br>Inoko:<br>This time, we have exhibited three pieces, two of which are interactive works.<br><br>“United, Fragmented, Repeated and Impermanent World” was created based on an artwork by Ito Jakuchu, an Edo-period painter. It is an interactive digital art piece since it gradually changes in response to viewers’ gestures.<br><br>There is also a space that showcases “Flowers and People – Gold and Dark” that has the function to make flowers fall when you touch them and to keep the flowers blooming when you remain a certain distance from them. Flowers bloom and die naturally without any interruption by humans. But in this art piece, the lives of flowers become shorter when you touch them and more flowers bloom if you stay away from them.<br><br>These kinds of interactive artworks are affected by viewers’ behaviors and they become complete art pieces by including viewers rather than having them as observers.<br><br>– Please tell us about team members of the project as well as the process from the design to the completion of your artwork.<br><br>Inoko:<br>“Life survives by the power of life” is created by a 3D CG animation team. First of all, we created a three-dimensional space on a computer and drew flowers and calligraphic brush strokes for the art piece in that space. Then, we transformed the drawings into animations using our theory of a logical structure of space called “Ultra Subjective Space.”<br><br>For “United, Fragmented, Repeated and Impermanent World,” we drew motifs inspired from Ito Jakuchu’s painting and then our CG team made three-dimensional objects of the drawings, which were then animated in a three dimensional space. The video was edited by computer to make tiles that make the mural change into abstract pixels when viewers face the tiles. The team for the project was made up of artists, a group of people for 3D animation, and engineers for the sensors.<br><br>I don’t envision the completed final versions of our artworks from the beginning. They are created through trial and error and we continually make improvements to our art pieces.<br><br>– What made you establish teamLab?<br><br>Inoko:<br>The main purpose of launching teamLab is to fulfill my personal interest. Not by myself, but with people with various specialties enabling us to experiment with a lot of new things. I wanted to offer a place where we can create and learn something new through experimentation. That’s why my company’s name includes the word “Lab.”<br><br>Right before going to college, the Internet came out and I recognized the coming of a new digital society, which led me to have an interest in creating something new in that new society. I was especially interested in changing people’s sense of value by innovation through technology and the arts.<br><br>However, the technological innovation had already been made by talented people in Silicon Valley – at such a spectacular level that I couldn’t compete with it. Therefore, I decided to focus on expanding the definition of art using digital technology and changing people’s minds by art, both of which hadn’t been done in Silicon Valley.<br><br>– Which aspects of the arts did you focus on?<br><br>Inoko:<br>Since I was little I have been immersed in computer games and comic books. For me they captured a space in a different way from that of Western perception, such as the space captured by a camera. One day, when I looked at a traditional Japanese art painting, I felt the way that the computer games and comic books are depicted on a flat screen is similar to that of traditional Japanese paintings. Then I started to look at many old Japanese paintings, and felt that old Japanese artists may have had a different spatial logic than that of Western perspective that fixes your view when you flatten a three-dimensional space. In the ideas of physics, which was my major at college, lenses and Western arts are considered to be a logical way to convert a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional space. However, I thought flat pictures of traditional Japanese arts are a result of a unique Japanese logic to convert a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional flat screen.<br><br>It was at the time when I was about to go to college that the internet rolled out, and I was so interested in the areas of computers, digital, Internet and computer networks that I started to think I wanted to work in that field. Computers enabled me to interpret a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional space in a variety of ways, so by using the computers I was trying to find out the Japanese spatial logic that is common to the old Japanese arts. Then by using that logic, I started to create Japanese art pieces myself.<br><br>– What did you want to represent in your artworks?&nbsp;<br><br>Inoko:<br>A reason that I started to create the artworks is because I wanted to find out the old Japanese spatial logic that is different from the Western perspective. When you look back at history, after big revolutions new ideas were introduced and completely new societies were established. In that process, things that had been important before the revolutions turned out not to be and vice versa. Therefore, I thought the old Japanese spatial concept was something that was disregarded in the modern society because there were no benefits to us. However, I believe there are some tips for the new society in that idea and I’m interested in finding it out and making things that go on into the future.<br><br>When you look for the traditional Japanese spatial logic, a common approach would be to read through old documents as historians do, but in my case I created simulations using a computer since my background is in physics. In the beginning, I had no idea about how the benefits from the traditional Japanese perspective go along with this new society and I started to find it out through a process of making my own artworks. So I kept making art pieces without thinking of places to showcase them.<br><br>– What are characteristics of teamLab’s artworks?

TOSHIYUKI INOKO

New York Times

Call it Japanese art, 2.0. The Japan Society’s latest exhibition, “Garden of Unearthly Delights,” includes, among other pieces, a modern take on a zen garden; new riffs on traditional woodblock-style prints; and adaptations of Japanese screen paintings made using digital renderings, animation and 3-D graphics. In putting the show together, the gallery’s director, Miwako Tezuka, worked with the independent curator Laura J. Mueller to find two artists and an art collective whose work conveys the breadth and talent of the new guard of Japanese artists. They are, in Tezuka and Mueller’s eyes, true “takumi,” or artisans who take to their subject matter with a meticulousness that is inherently Japanese.<br><br>The artist Hisashi Tenmyouya refers to his style of work as “basara,” or outlaw culture, and his pieces are equally defiant and respectful of tradition. His zen garden, which takes over most of a room, is Tenmyouya’s first large-scale installation and was inspired by the Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto — with a twist. The “rocks” and “sand” (made of fiberglass-reinforced polyester and calcium carbonate, respectively) are embedded with skulls, and the sand is colored crimson, to symbolize the devastation and unrest caused by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the natural disasters of March 11, 2011, and the Senkaku Islands dispute.<br><br>The zen garden is part of “Rhyme” (2012), which includes a large diptych, one half of which is a digital rendition of the other. The work’s distinctive background coloring echoes traditional Japanese art made with kinpaku (gold leaf); meanwhile, the foreground imagery depicts men in loincloths, riding horses in battle. By coupling Japanese feudal-era art with traditional screen painting, Tenmyouya brings a new perspective to two genres.<br><br>The focal point of Manabu Ikeda’s work is nature: primarily, climate change and man’s participation in it. In Ikeda’s hands, nature becomes anthropomorphic, powerful and perhaps even vindictive, as if preparing to reclaim the landscape from mankind — which might represent a kind of justice in the artist’s eyes. “I grew up in the country, ” he says, “I love rock climbing, hiking and fishing. It’s sad to watch nature disappearing, fading away.”<br><br>Inspired by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, “Meltdown” depicts industrial factories precariously perched atop a large block of ice, which looks like a glacier about to strike a large field of grass. Ikeda was in Vancouver in March 2011 when the tsunami hit Japan, and “Meltdown” juxtaposes the beautiful local Canadian scenery against the destruction in Fukushima.<br><br>“Foretoken” might be the more controversial of Ikeda’s two large-scale paintings in the exhibition. The work, a nod to Hokusai’s famous woodblock painting “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” — with its large, looming waves absorbing all of civilization in their wake — was created in 2008 but hasn’t been shown since then. Museum representatives in Japan told him the public wasn’t ready to experience the piece after March 11, Ikeda explains; its imagery was too reminiscent of the 23-foot tsunami. He hopes for a better reception in New York.<br><br>TeamLab, a design collective whose work varies from creating websites to fine art, considers its style to be all-around “positive.” Initially founded by five graduates of the prestigious Tokyo University, the company has since ballooned to approximately 350 employees. About 15 of those employees were central to “Flowers and People — Gold and Dark” (2014), a digital landscape of flowers that encompasses a whole room at the exhibition. Team Lab offers viewers a way to participate in the art: By walking on the floor or touching the walls, attendees will set off a motion that propels the flowers to bloom, wither and fall from the trees.<br><br>“What you are watching at this moment will never repeat itself forever,” says Ikkan Sanada, an advisor for Team Lab. “It’s a very complicated software; even TeamLab doesn’t know what will happen. The basic structure, the kind of flowers used and such are already programmed, but in which order and where it happens is very random.”<br><br>“Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya &amp; teamLab,” begins today at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, (212) 832-1155; japansociety.org.

At the Japan Society, Old Traditions and New Techniques

Asia This Week

TeamLab is a company of mathematicians, designers and computer programmers that uses technology to come up with works of art. It has received awards in countries such as France and Canada and has enjoyed favorable reviews at the Singapore Biennale, a modern art festival being held through mid-February. The team uses a creation process that transcends the conventional wisdom in order to bring out the creativity of each member involved.

Life Survives by the Power of Life

Life Survives by the Power of Life

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