Tokyo art collective is bringing its popular light installations to Europe

The award-winning art collective, teamLab, is set to open a permanent exhibition in the Netherlands, giving their insanely popular light installations a new home in Utrecht.

Tokyo-based teamLab is renowned for its multi-sensory exhibitions that draw sold-out crowds all over the world, from Shanghai to Seoul to San Francisco. The shows are usually centred around light, sound, digital sequences and immersive experiences. Giant glowing musical balls, waterfall projections and exploding flowers have all featured in teamLab pieces but perhaps the collective’s most famous work is Crystal Universe, an immersive light show that uses LED lights to create 3D celestial patterns that visitors can walk through. Chances are if you didn't catch the exhibition in real life, you came across dozens of images of it on Instagram.

Now, the international art group is preparing to open a permanent exhibition in the Netherlands, taking over a new digital art venue called Nowhere in Utrecht’s famous green urban development project Wonderwoods. This will be teamLab's first permanent base in Europe, joining its other homes in Tokyo and Shanghai. “The Netherlands is a country with a high digital awareness, and thus makes it the perfect base for digital art collectives and exhibitions,” Nowhere’s founder Jeroen van Mastrigt said in a statement.

The space will include artwork from the collective’s members, as well the ‘Future Park’ area, a sort of educational amusement park that fosters collaboration and creative thinking, and an ‘Athletic Forest’, which will provide a creative athletic space for visitors, or as teamLab puts it, “promotes growth of the hippocampus of the brain and trains spatial awareness.”

Speaking of the collaboration between teamLab and Wonderwoods, the site's founder Jet Happel said, “we invite visitors from all over the world to not only enjoy Wonderwoods as an iconic landmark but also to immerse themselves in a magical playground of digital art."

TeamLab's exhibition in Nowhere will open in 2024. To stay up-to-date on more immediate exhibitions, see here.

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