teamLab Calls off Its Flashy New York Debut to Rethink Its Strategy for Cracking the US Market

New Yorkers, brace yourselves for disappointment. teamLab’s
immersive light experience is no longer headed to the Big Apple
this month.

The insanely popular digital art collective was due to
launch a huge permanent exhibition in Brooklyn’s Industry City
in August, but it has halted work on the project in order to
reconsider its US game plan, artnet News has learned.

“With regards to teamLab coming to New York, we have paused work
toward a permanent exhibition while we rethink our strategy for
entering the American market,” a spokeswoman for teamLab tells
artnet News.

The Japan-based team of computer programmers, animators,
engineers, designers, mathematicians, and architects, are known for
their mind-bending light installations. The interdisciplinary
collective, which was founded in 2001, already has two incredibly
popular spaces in Tokyo. Its permanent space, teamLab Borderless,
drew 2.3 million visitors in its inaugural year, which
is greater than the attendance
of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

A version of teamLab Planets, a temporary exhibition in the
Japanese capital that attracted 1.2 million visitors last year, was
due to open in Brooklyn this summer. The collective excited
its New York fans when it signed an 11-year lease on a
55,000-square-foot warehouse at Sunset Park last year. It is
unclear what will happen in the space now. “We continue to work
with Industry City to determine how we can make them a part of the
updated strategy,” teamLab’s spokeswoman says.

teamLab’s chief creative officer Takumi Nomoto explained last year
that they had selected New York for the permanent space as it was
best located for “more people to come and see our digital museum.”
While work on the New York venture has been paused for now, the
collective has announced an exhibition on the West Coast. It will
show at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles,
which is now due to open in 2020 after several delays set
back the museum’s inauguration.

teamLab is represented by Pace, which most recently closed an
exhibition of the collective’s light installations at its Palo Alto
space in January. An earlier exhibition organized by the gallery in
2016 at a former car dealership in Menlo Park drew 200,000
visitors over the course of its 10-month run.

In the meantime, teamLab is preparing to open a version of
Borderless in Shanghai’s Huangpu District this fall, which will
include new works.

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Rethink Its Strategy for Cracking the US Market appeared first
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