Photo: teamLab Planets Exterior – teamLab

Floating Flowers: Latest 3D Garden Exhibition From TeamLab Planets

Resonating microcosms found only in Tokyo

Photo: teamLab Planets Exterior – teamLab
Caleb Cello   - 9 min read

Are you looking for a place where you can indulge yourself in artistic pieces all while being one with nature? The TeamLab Planets is a unique, body-immersive museum where visitors, much to the surprise of many, come in barefoot. Can it get any more interesting than that? Well, it certainly does. Unlike other museums, TeamLab Planets offers a tour that enables you to walk on water and be inside three-dimensional gardens where you find yourself becoming one with the surrounding flowers. The more you explore each garden, the more you feel like you’re in an ideal world, with nothing but bright colors, flowery scents, and peaceful flowing waters.

Located in Toyosu, Tokyo, this one-of-a-kind museum offers a whole new world for visitors with its vibrant water, garden, and public areas. It is the goal of TeamLab artists to create an ideal place where art, technology, modern design, and the beauty of the natural world can be united. TeamLab aims to convey a message that even with the continuous upgrade of the world toward higher technology, it is still important to preserve nature’s beauty as something that will offer great comfort and peace, a convenience that even the modern world won’t be able to grant.

Being one with nature in mind, body, and soul: TeamLab’s latest attraction, the floating flower garden

Photo: Floating Flower Garden – teamLab

“Flowers and I are of the same root, the garden and I am one”. With this in mind, TeamLab wanted to create an area where people will feel like they are connected to nature. Made from flowers arranged in a three-dimensional manner, this flower garden will surely make you feel like you’re one with the flowers as the movements you make have an impact on the garden’s movement. The entire place is filled with floating flowers that are within visitors’ reach, so when you make small movements, the flowers will also plummet towards you or the direction you’re going.

As people continue to explore the place, the flowers also hover above, creating a space for people to appreciate the overall framework of the area.

Photo: Floating Flower Garden – teamLab

What’s great about TeamLab is that they use live flowers to create such a masterpiece. Nothing in this floating garden is artificial, so you can enjoy the reality of being one with nature. Everything is blooming and they take care of the flowers to ensure that they are in the best condition. TeamLab creates this garden art with blooming epiphytic orchids across the entire area. There are hanging plants that are best known for their ability to grow without being placed in soil that gain the necessary amount of nutrition they need, such as water, from the air.

The ground, on the other hand, is surrounded by other blooming flowers and real plants made to make the area look more natural and alive. It is a great place for you to just relax and forget about the chaos of the outside world. A place where you experience nothing but the sound and sights of Mother Nature’s creations. This floating garden will be an ideal place to disconnect from the fast-paced reality and reconnect with the calming flow of nature.

Photo: Floating Flower Garden – teamLab

Yes, you might think of this garden as a work of art made to help humans find solace, but TeamLab also created this beautiful garden area to help make a home for these flowers and plants. Artists take these plants and foster them to create a healthy living environment to ensure that they are always in their best condition. No flowers are abused and disregarded in this artwork space and you can see how much effort artists put on the overall appearance.

They say that artwork never lies. You can always see when an artist is truly passionate about what they're doing. It will always resonate with their art. In this floating garden, you can see the amount of passion and patience each artist has in the calming and graceful art created.

Walking through a moss garden of reactive ovoids

Photo: Moss Garden of Resonation Microcosms – teamLab

Japan is known for bridging ancient culture with modern trends. Like the floating garden, TeamLab's Moss Garden of Resonating Microcosm gives you the perfect balance of a digital landscape and an organic setting. With the hustle and bustle of life, don’t you think you deserve a break? This is an out-of-the-world experience that not only visually satisfies but allows you to interact with the wonders of the museum as well.

This large exhibition space contains ovoids, that with sunrise, reflect their surroundings to create an ethereal sight. The ovoids fall back and then rise when pushed down or blown by the wind, emitting a resonant tone. The surrounding ovoids also respond one after another, maintaining the same tone. Now imagine going by group (we urge you to bring your family or friends) and simultaneously moving the ovoids, which not only create a series of light but of sound as well.

Photo: Moss Garden of Resonation Microcosms – teamLab

If you’re a fan of Ghibli movies then you’ll liken the atmosphere with the ovoids to the mythical spirits found in the forest in Princess Mononoke. The ovoids produce a lot of colors but begin to flicker slowly at the lack of sound and movement, like magic that’s been lifted. The creators behind this masterpiece wanted to make sure that their vision was multi-dimensional.

Its stimulating features really give art a new meaning and opens up doors of endless possibilities. This is no longer about containing the world through art, but rather, freeing the world through art.

It takes two to tango: An Interactive art between human and Koi

Photo: Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People - Infinity – teamLab

For its last digital domain, we have the drawing on the water surface by the Dance of Koi and people. TeamLab wanted to break conventional barriers with its art installation, and to do that required more than a massive space and advanced technology. What set it apart was the need for human intervention.

On the surface of the water, there is a seemingly endless and fascinating dance caused by Koi swimming. People become part of the performance as they walk into the water because the directions of the Koi depend on their presence. What’s more, a collision with the Koi causes them to turn into a dreamy state of scattered flowers.

Photo: Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People - Infinity – teamLab

Because the interaction between the viewer and the installation results in continuous change in the artwork, this compels people to work with one another in creating unique patterns. A computer program renders the work in real-time and is neither prerecorded nor on a loop so it gives you that surging energy of living in the moment- knowing that you cannot replicate its previous visual states, nor will the same design occur.

Doesn’t the idea of making fleeting but beautiful memories with other people in the form of art, fill you with excitement and longing for a world that you have yet to set foot in but feel as if it’s already a part of you? The digital world offered by TeamLab is not one to be missed in your lifetime!

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Find out more about teamLab Planets.

Caleb Cello

Caleb Cello @cello.caleb