Screens That Erase the Screen: teamLab and the Box-Office Model of Immersive Art

You take off your shoes, roll up your trouser legs, and step into water up to the knee. At teamLab Planets in Toyosu, the first thing a visitor passes through is an approach corridor where the soles of the feet and the darkness are the only things to go by. There is no frame there and no edge of a screen. The image is not pasted across one wall; it winds itself around the surface of the water, around the floor, around the outline of your own body. Stand still and a school of koi swims aside to avoid your feet; move and the light breaks and scatters. What is there is very nearly the opposite of the urban screens this journal habitually follows — the few minutes of vacancy that open in an advertising surface along the street, the single picture kindled on a facade. The city is shut out, the screen is erased, and in its place the whole body is submerged inside the work.

teamLab is the collective that has made this paradox — screens for erasing the screen — hold on the largest scale, and the most profitably, of anyone in the world.

Lineage — From Five Science Students to Six Hundred

teamLab was founded in 2001; its registration as a company goes back to the end of the previous year. It was started by five people centred on Toshiyuki Inoko (born in Tokushima in 1977), who had just graduated from the Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo — science and engineering students out of the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. That the starting point was neither an art school nor a gallery but a body of engineers who had studied probability and statistics and natural language processing has governed everything that came afterwards.

teamLab calls itself an interdisciplinary collective of "ultratechnologists." Artists, programmers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects, engineers and editors are mixed together on the same production floor, and the boundaries of specialism are deliberately dissolved — "transferable knowledge" is held up as an operating principle. The headcount is given differently at different moments, but as of 2024 it had reached a scale of more than six hundred. Every individual work is released under the single name teamLab, and who made which part is not disclosed. This anonymity, as will be seen below, comes to carry considerable weight both critically and commercially.

The starting point of its international presence was the representation agreement concluded in 2014 with the major New York gallery Pace Gallery. Within Japan, however, teamLab chose as its main axis not the gallery model but a box-office model of running its own permanent venues. As teamLab itself recalls having been "ignored by the Japanese art world in the early years," this is a collective that went first for a different legitimacy — audience numbers — rather than waiting for the institutional endorsement of criticism.

Screens That Erase the Screen — Five Concepts

teamLab operates "concepts" rather than "individual works" as its brand assets. Some twenty concept pages are lined up on the official site, but the pillars that support the collective's design thinking can be reduced to the following five.

The first is Borderless. It refers to a state in which works hold no physical or conceptual boundary between one another, moving into and interfering with each other's space. A single picture crosses over wall, floor, ceiling and the next room. Inoko says that as people come to understand the world by dividing it up with language and logic, they lose the recognition that "everything is continuous, without borders." Borderless is an attempt to restore that lost continuity as space, and it has become the shared brand name of the flagship venues from Tokyo to Shanghai to Jeddah, and on to Hamburg in 2026.

The second is Body Immersive. A design that sinks not only the eye but the whole body into the work, typified by the experience at Planets of "entering the water" and "going barefoot." People today see the world through the lens of photographs and video, and a boundary has formed between the body and the world — that boundary is erased by the soles of the feet, by humidity, by darkness. Rather than look at a screen, you get wet inside it.

The third is Ultrasubjective Space. A concept that reconstructs in digital space not Western perspective but the moving viewpoint and the coexistence of multiple time axes found in Japanese picture scrolls. People who came out of probability and statistics and natural language processing re-evaluate the spatial expression of emakimono, sliding-door paintings and ukiyo-e as "a non-Cartesian description of space that possesses its own logic," and implement it through engineering. Where individual artists in Europe and the United States often take "the viewpoint of machines or of data" as their subject, what teamLab installs is "the perception of an Eastern human being" — and that is the core of its ideological differentiation.

The remaining two, Digitized Nature and Co-Creation, connect directly to the shape of the box office. The former is a methodology that adds no physical alteration to existing nature — forest, waterfall, hot spring, terraced field — and turns the place itself into a work by digital means (Mifuneyama Rakuen in Saga is the representative case). The latter is the principle of building the audience in as a generative factor of the work, as in Sketch Aquarium, where a picture drawn by a visitor swims off into the tank. Co-Creation turns the visitor into a triple being: a viewer, a part of the work, and a customer for merchandise, all at once.

What the five concepts share is a direction: stop using the screen as "a window for looking out at the world." If the street signage this journal follows opens a "window" into the city, teamLab erases the window frame and takes the viewer across to the other side of the picture. In order to erase the screen, it covers all of the space with screen.

The Box Office as a Form — Real Estate and the State Drawn In

What decisively separates teamLab from every other collective of its era is a management structure that runs its own permanent, ticketed venues at more than ten sites worldwide. It contains three businesses in one — production studio, box-office operator and content licensor — and the scale and permanence of this stand in contrast to comparable studios in Europe and the United States (Random International, Universal Everything, Marshmallow Laser Feast), which almost all remain within a model of touring or time-limited runs at museums and galleries. teamLab's permanent venues are, with almost no exception, constituted as joint ventures or co-productions with a large real-estate development entity or a national cultural-tourism authority.

Follow the chronology and the logic of that expansion comes into view. In 2018, Borderless opened in Mori Building's "MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM" in Odaiba (about 10,000 m²). The following year, 2019, it gathered 2.198 million visitors and was certified by Guinness World Records as "the most visited museum dedicated to a single artist." In that same year, 2018, Planets opened in Toyosu in partnership with DMM. The Odaiba Borderless closed for a time in 2022 and reopened in February 2024, relocated to Mori Building's Azabudai Hills redevelopment — 1.55 million visitors in its opening year, 65% of them international, a composition that shows this venue functioning as a hub of Tokyo's cultural tourism. Planets in Toyosu, too, drew more than 2.5 million in fiscal 2023 and took a second Guinness record.

Overseas, the roster of partners likewise tells the strategy directly. Casinos and integrated resorts: Marina Bay Sands in Singapore (2016–), Sands China in Macau (2023–). Gulf states: the Saudi Ministry of Culture (Jeddah, 2024–), the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi (2025–). And in Europe, in partnership with the financial group UBS, one of the continent's largest permanent venues is scheduled to open in Hamburg in spring 2026. Phenomena, which opened in Abu Dhabi in April 2025, is at about 17,000 m² the largest in the world, and is moreover the first purpose-built architecture teamLab has had. A collective that had until now covered the insides of existing buildings with its works has at last built the vessel itself for the sake of the work.

What is established here is a revenue structure that integrates ticketing, merchandise and creative experience into one. The three-city tour via Pace in the second half of the 2010s alone is reported to have reached box-office revenue of about US$10 million. No other "artist" is able to sustain paid attendance on the scale of millions in a single year, and it is more accurate to speak of that business scale in the same row as Cirque du Soleil or Disney Imagineering than as art.

A Landslide in Attendance, a Grey Zone in Criticism

The assessment of teamLab does not resolve into an image unless approval and objection are given equal weight.

Seen from the side of approval, Pace Gallery's head Marc Glimcher has called it "the ideal form of post-art," positioning it as the best product for delivering contemporary art to the wealthy of Silicon Valley. The Art Newspaper described the Azabudai Borderless as "a whole-body joy" and received the Abu Dhabi Phenomena, somewhere between neutral and positive, as "a device that updates the tourism model of the Saadiyat Cultural District." The World Economic Forum and Gulf cultural authorities have institutionally endorsed teamLab as "a reference point for a model of cultural tourism as soft power." Future Park, aimed at children, has had a cumulative worldwide participation of more than six million and is introduced as one of the standards of digital education.

On the other side, criticism holds a number of reservations. In 2021 ARTnews asked whether teamLab needs the art world — the question being whether this collective requires the institutional endorsement of museums, galleries and criticism in the first place. The "Instagrammable" critique has been repeated as well: that the work is designed for images that circulate on social media rather than for deep contemplation, and that the visitor route is laid out selfie-first. A reviewer at the Boston Globe dismissed the imagery as "banal and sentimental," and wrote that the declared subject of "nature and humanity" was overblown and heavy. In 2021 teamLab itself sued a similar Los Angeles venue, Museum of Dream Space, for copyright infringement. Scepticism was voiced at the same time that a strategy of alleging imitation on visual resemblance alone risks eroding teamLab's own claim to originality.

What is interesting is that where individual artists are frequently exposed to concentrated fire, teamLab has been comparatively spared it. The anonymity of the collective dilutes personal attack; criticism spins its wheels in the face of overwhelming audience support; and institutional endorsement from Pace, Mori Building and national cultural authorities was in place at an early stage — that compound has quietly inverted the order of which, criticism or the box office, is the source of legitimacy.

The Opposite Side of Tenkei

The model teamLab presents lies exactly on the opposite side of what this journal has pursued under the word tenkei.

When art comes to dwell in street signage, that screen opens a slight ma — an interval — in a continuous commercial sequence, and there a single work, changing monthly, rises up as a tenkei. A tenkei does not occupy space. It appears as one dot within the scenery of the city, behaves for a while, and disappears again. Like the boat or the traveller in a landscape painting, it is placed not as the protagonist of the view but as a small mark that gives the view its time and its bearing. That is one implementation of "turning the city itself into a museum" — the direction that NEORT, this journal's parent, holds up as its mission.

What teamLab chose was the exact reverse. Fold the city away, erase the frame of the screen, and draw the visitor into the darkness on the far side of a ticket. The museum is not dissolved into the city; it is built as a closed vessel cut off from the city. There the work is not a point but an environment, and the visitor is not a witness in passing but a participant who goes barefoot into water and sinks in bodily. And what is decisive is that inside that vessel people "flock" — instead of looking up at a screen alone, they share the same darkness with strangers, and each other's movements change the work. In teamLab, the screen becomes not a window for solitary viewing but the apparatus of a place that raises a gathering (KAI, 会).

This is not a question of which is right. The few minutes of ma that open in the street and the total vessel cut off from the street are two different engineering solutions to the same question: where does digital art live? One tries to turn the city into a museum; the other tries to complete the museum itself as a single universe. What teamLab has demonstrated over more than two decades is the fact that the latter can be made to hold — without waiting for the endorsement of criticism, in exchange for the bodies of several million people.

When a visitor who has taken off their shoes and stepped into the water watches, in the darkness, the koi of light swim aside to avoid their own feet, that person is no longer on the street. In order to erase the screen, teamLab made everything in the world a screen. And inside that screen it is gathering people at a density that never occurs in the street.

Sources

1. fig.001teamLab — Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People - Infinity (official channel)
2. fig.002teamLab — 増殖する生命 / Proliferating Immense Life (official channel)
3. fig.003teamLab — Entangled Sun (official channel)
4. fig.004teamLab — 自立しつつも呼応する生命 / Autonomous Resonating Life (official channel)
5. [5]teamLab — Official Site (teamlab.art)
6. [6]teamLab — About / team-lab.com
7. [7]teamLab — Concepts
8. [8]teamLab — Borderless TOKYO (Azabudai Hills)
9. [9]teamLab — Planets TOKYO
10. [10]teamLab — Phenomena Abu Dhabi
11. [11]teamLab Borderless Becomes the Most Visited Single-Artist Museum in the World — Business Wire(2019-08)
12. [12]teamLab Planets TOKYO sets Guinness World Record — blooloop
13. [13]In Tokyo, teamLab’s giant new immersive space — The Art Newspaper(2024-05)
14. [14]teamLab’s vast interactive art museum opens in Abu Dhabi — The Art Newspaper(2025-04)
15. [15]teamLab Borderless Azabudai Hills, one year on — Tokyo Art Beat(2024-11)
16. [16]teamLab’s Silicon Valley Pace Show — Artnet(2017)
17. [17]Why Does teamLab Need the Art World? (Andrew Russeth) — ARTnews(2021)
18. [18]teamLab Sues Museum of Dream Space — Artnet(2021)
19. [19]Toshiyuki Inoko: Transcending Boundaries — Studio International