Modern art goes high-tech

A Tokyo art group is drawing huge crowds with immersive shows, Deng Zhangyu reports.

Since opening in June, Tokyo-based art collective team-Lab's immersive shows-Borderless at Tokyo's Mori building and TeamLab Planets at a temporarily-built art space just a 10-minute drive from the Mori building-have attracted about 1.7 million visitors from across the world.

Every day, visitors wait in long lines for admission to experience an immersive world that has been created by an art group comprising engineers, architects, mathematicians, programmers and computer graphic specialists.

As for the shows' popularity, they are soon expected to receive more visitors than the Museum of Modern Art in New York within the first five months of opening, says Toshiyuki Inoko, founder of team-Lab.

"It took 18 years for us to be recognized by people," says Inoko, who set up teamLab in 2001 while he was completing his graduate studies in information physics at the University of Tokyo. His group comprised just a few members then, but has now grown to about 500.

In the past few years, teamLab has led the world of digital art by offering interactive experience and immersive shows by mixing art and technology. And they have also received numerous invitations from museums, art centers and galleries around the world.