Image: Mori Building Digital Art Museum: EPSON teamLab Borderless, Kyoto
teamLab’s ‘teamLab Botanical Garden Osaka’ is presented as a permanent night open-air museum at Nagai Botanical Garden in Osaka, where the collective uses the site’s plants, lake and wider ecosystem as the basis for a large-scale digital art environment. According to the project description, the exhibition has been on view since July 29, 2022, and is built around artworks that respond to weather, wildlife and visitors rather than remaining fixed in place.
The project extends teamLab’s ‘Digitized Nature’ approach, in which non-material digital technology is used to turn nature into art without damaging it. The collective describes the exhibition as exploring the continuity of life and the ambiguous boundaries between organisms and environment. In that framing, the garden itself is not a backdrop but part of the work’s structure: if trees, birds or ecological conditions change, the artworks change with them, or disappear entirely.
Nagai Botanical Garden provides the setting for that idea. The official site describes the garden as an outdoor botanical garden that opened in 1974 inside Nagai Park, an urban park established in 1944. It spans 240,000 square metres and includes a large central lake. teamLab’s project draws on those features, including the garden’s flora, its lake and the relationships among forest, water, birds and human presence.
Among the works listed on the exhibition page are ‘Resonating Microcosms in the Common Camellia Garden - Solidified Light Color, Dusk to Dawn’, ‘Resonating Microcosms in the Common Camellia Garden - Liquified Light Color, Dusk to Dawn’, ‘Forest of Autonomous Resonating Life - Eucalyptus’ and ‘Resonating Trees’. These pieces use light, sound and sensing systems to make ovoid forms and trees react when pushed, touched, blown by wind or struck by rain, with nearby elements responding in sequence. The descriptions also emphasize that wild animals can activate parts of the environment alongside people.
Other works bring the same responsive logic to different areas of the garden. ‘Pillars that Dance with the Wind’ changes in number, movement and height according to wind, rain and humidity, and may not be shown in strong weather. ‘Sculptures of Dissipative Birds in the Wind’ is tied to bird movement and the surrounding ecosystem on the lake’s island, while ‘Floating Resonating Lamps on Oike Lake - Fire’ lights and sounds up when people stand nearby or when wind moves the lamps across the water.
The exhibition also includes forest-based and path-based installations such as ‘Concrete and Abstract - Secondary Forest Entrance’, ‘Walk, Walk, Walk - Secondary Forest’, ‘Universe of Fire Particles in the Forest - Secondary Forest’ and ‘Avenue of Cypress Trees’. Each is presented as a real-time or interactive environment shaped by the viewer’s movement, the surrounding flora or the conditions of the site.
The official page also lists upcoming additions. Under “What’s New,” it notes that from Aug. 1, ‘Untitled’ will be joined by “White sunflowers emerge from the darkness of the night, glowing brightly.” A note on the site says that updates should be checked via @teamLab_Nagai on X in the event of rain or strong winds.
