Art Collective teamLab’s Tokyo Museum Overtakes the Van Gogh Museum as the World’s Most Popular Single-Artist Institution

The art collective teamLab’s new, immersive museum in Tokyo
attracted more visitors than the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam last
year, and twice the combined number of visitors to the three Dalí
museums in Spain. The box-office success of teamLab’s museum
in its inaugural year
makes the venue the world’s most visited single-artist museum, its
organizers claim.

In its first year of operation, teamLab Borderless in Tokyo
attracted 2.3 million visitors in total. A further 1.2 million
visitors enjoyed the collective’s temporary immersive light
experience in Japan’s capital.

While Japan has long been the land of blockbuster shows, the
attendance statistics underscore the appeal of immersive
experiences worldwide, especially among millennials and members of
Gen Z. Visitors came from more than 160 countries to experience
teamLab’s installations in Tokyo, with nearly a third coming from
the United States.

This bodes well for the popular tech-art collective, which is due
to open a 55,000-square-foot
museum in Brooklyn’s Industry City later this month. To put
teamLab’s attendance in a New York perspective, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s Costume Institute blockbuster, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion
and the Catholic Imagination,” the most-attended show in
the museum’s history, attracted 1.7 million visitors in
2018—considerably less than teamLab’s museum. 

Founded in 2001 in Japan, the
collective of artists, programmers, engineers, animators,
architects, and mathematicians seeks to explore through interactive
light sculptures how art, science, technology, and design fit in
with the natural world. They have been greeted by a mix of
skepticism from the art world and boundless enthusiasm from the
general public. 

The permanent museum called
teamLab Borderless, and a temporary experience, teamLab Planets,
opened last summer in Tokyo’s Odaiba and Toyosu
neighborhoods. General
admission to each venue is $30. Visitors to the teamLab Borderless
museum interact with constantly shifting light sculptures, which
move around the space, offering visitors the experience of a
“museum without a map.”

In the teamLab Planets
experience, visitors experience an illusion that they are immersed
in water as they walk barefoot through the space. The
light-and-sound installations respond to visitors’
movements. 

Around half of the visitors to
teamLab Borderless came from overseas, with 27 percent coming from
the US, followed by
Australia, China, Thailand, Canada, and the UK. Some 50 percent of
these overseas visitors stated that visiting the museum was their
reason for coming to Tokyo, according to an in-house
survey. Around 30
percent of the 1.25 million people who visited teamLab Planets in
Toyosu were from overseas; 43 percent came from the US.

The immersive experiences in
Tokyo had greater attendance than Amsterdam’s Van Gogh
Museum, which received just over 2.1 million visitors last year,
and more than twice the attendance of Barcelona’s Picasso Museum
(949,000 visitors) and the Dalí Theatre-Museum (1,105,000
visitors) in the north of Spain.

teamLab
Borderless is located
at 1-3-8 Aomi, Koto-ku,
Tokyo. teamLab Planets is on view until fall 2020 at
6 Chome-1-16 Toyosu, Koto,
Tokyo.

The post Art Collective teamLab’s Tokyo Museum Overtakes the
Van Gogh Museum as the World’s Most Popular Single-Artist
Institution appeared first on artnet News.