Inside the new TeamLab Biovortex Kyoto: First look

From the darkness, flowers bloom. They stretched, many darlings and were full of energy, dwarfing the audience below. Then they disappeared, withered, withered. As the sunflower buds burst, the golden and glorious music swelled. The audience’s cameras rise up to capture the moment. One of TeamLab members, formerly a professional in art, whispered, this impermanence represents a permanent cycle of life and death. Her words echo in every exhibition space.

In other rooms, burning calligraphy overwhelmed, then evaporated, and the glittering ball suddenly spiraled into the tower, the soap foam sculpture defied gravity. TeamLab Biovortex Kyoto’s artwork is Brain, a sprawling new museum from a well-known international art collective, scheduled to open on October 7 – equally dazzling and chaotic.

TeamLab, “Unt Title” © TeamLab

TeamLab Experience

Founded in 2001, TeamLab Artist Collective has launched more than 20 companies in Japan and abroad. Tokyo hosts two of the most recognized museums: Toyosu’s Teamlab planet and the borderless TeamLab: Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Azabudai Hills, which is considered the world’s first immersive digital museum.

TeamLab Planets offers more physical experiences in both. Guests wade in the water, chase light rays of koi fish, or bounce on large rotating spheres like they do in video games. TeamLabless, by contrast, is a maze filled with light and sound that creates a sense of saturation. Its exhibits respond to visitors’ movement and touch, inviting introspection about the boundary between itself and its environment.

These two spaces embody TeamLab’s shadow and lighting, a signature fusion of digital and tactile, and a mix of nature and technology. The new Kyoto location embarked on a similar theoretical path, but on a larger scale, and introduced works that are not seen anywhere else in the world.

TeamLab, “The Forest of Resonance Light: A Stroke” – Fire© teamLab

Kyoto Biouniverse: Same Vision, New Ambience

TeamLab Biovortex will open on October 7, 2025 and is expected to be as big as its Tokyo counterpart. It is part of the Urban Development Program, aiming to revitalize the area southeast of Kyoto Station and turn it into an arts center. It took more than four years to complete it from artists, musicians to programmers and mathematicians. The space will host over 50 works in four floors and 10,000 square meters of space, making it one of the largest TeamLabs in the world.

TeamLab Biovortex Kyoto takes the frolic of TeamLab planets and pushes it to a more conceptual territory. It revisits two frequent TeamLab themes: “cognitive sculpture”, which create forms and “environmental phenomena” that exist only in the perception of the audience, in which the artwork is shaped by its environment. All exhibits, including several unique to Kyoto, explore ambiguous edges, changing conditions and blurred boundaries.

Highlights of the museum

TeamLab Bivortex’s devices move smoothly between gentle and overwhelming ranges, each installation detects the perceived edges. Two of them (“The Way of Birds” and “Eternal Word Universe” are installed in a mirrored hemisphere and function on a scale of amazing and slightly vertigo-induced. Their best experience when sitting down. The former is the gentleness of both. A group of spectral birds swept over the head overhead, choreographed gently. In contrast, the latter swallows the audience in sounds and rituals. When the bells and monks chant, a large amount of crimson calligraphy drowns out the vision, and their resonance reminds the temple district of Kyoto.

The museum’s two charming “resonant lamps” spaces are filled with the light of hundreds of colorful lights. When approaching, they respond, opening one by one, emitting light across the mirror space. The installation embodies the key TeamLab philosophy that art was born through interaction. In contrast, in the “transformed continuum”, the audience’s participation has little impact on the work. The room was filled with constant movement. Music drones and surfing, its bass emphasizes the roar of the ball. They twist into towering DNA-like structures, chaoticly collapsed and shrank throughout the space, and then fell into piles on the floor.

TeamLab, “Traces of Life” ©TeamLab *Reference Image

One of the most unique and fascinating devices is the “massless amorphous structure”. Consisting of floating soap bubbles, never completely touching the ceiling or floor, it is fragile and self-recovering, breaking and reforming in response to touch. Through the interaction of air, water and movement alone, its edges are intentionally ambiguous, prompting visitors to rethink what it means for the form of art.

TeamLab Bivortex is short and memorable, but offers a unique vision for TeamLab’s unique vision within a huge range. It arrives in Kyoto, expanding collective works and providing fresh artworks and space to explore its philosophy. But unlike the short lifespan of flowers, this new ambitious adventure will remain here.

More information

To learn more about TeamLab Bivortex Kyoto and to purchase tickets for your visit, click here.