Exclusive interview with teamLab: Defying Rigidity (3)

teamLab is an international art collective with members from around the world.

Mung7Art highly appreciates teamLab being conscious of the art of creating art.

teamLab began with five graduates in 2001. They started off at a group show, then a gallery, pavilion, then on to bigger venues, a massive park, before finally launching their own digital-only 10,000-sqm museum. Since then teamLab have executed countless exhibits welcoming millions of visitors.

And the superb collective is now working to digitise a city development project in Shenzhen (expected in 2021), including turning the city's public space into a positive shared space by applying teamLab art.

How may an art collective keep vigilance from being rigid or set in ways, in thinking and in the “corporate” culture?

We believe that teamLab is truly an art collective in the sense that our artworks are created from conception to realization in-house: we have teams dedicated to the creation of materials and hardware, as well as to the architectural design and development of software.

What really makes teamLab unique is not the technological advancement, but rather the fact that teamLab has become able to do truly massive art projects simultaneously worldwide in-house at a high speed - to the extent that no one has been able to do before.

With several hundred strong specialists, teamLab has become bigger than ever as we increased the size of our own team, our own funds, as well as the number of people who are willing to support what we want to do, because of our more widespread recognition.

We develop our own systems; however, it is the advances in video equipment and technology that make it easier for us to do what we want to do, which are not necessarily teamLab's innovations.

There are other media artists that use much more advanced technology than we do. What is really interesting (and often chaotic) with teamLab is that while we combine relatively new technologies, we turn our ideas into visuals and scales that no one has ever imagined and execute everything with an in-house team. teamLab is evolving so much faster and more dynamically than ever before, and that is not only because of the technology, but also due to the perfect balance of creativity, concepts, funding, resources, and being a massive, talented team that can push boundaries forward.

Photo Credits: teamLab, Exhibition view of MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless, 2018, Tokyo © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery &

Mung7Art