A Digitalised Night in Nature

The art collective teamLab has achieved worldwide acclaim, and in the spring of 2021, they created an installation for Kairakuen, of Mito City, Ibaraki Prefecture. 

Built in the late Edo period (1842), this Chisen-Kaiyushiki style garden is one of the "Three Great Gardens of Japan", along with Kenrokuen in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture and Korakuen in Okayama Prefecture. It has long attracted visitors as a national historic site and there is no doubt that the biggest reason for its popularity is the beautiful plum grove.

Plum has a particular significance for Japanese people. The oldest surviving Japanese poetry collection, "Manyoshu", which was composed over the 7th and 8th centuries, has no fewer than 119 poems featuring plum trees. By contrast, the cherry tree - nowadays a national obsession - featured in only 45 poems.

The difference is remarkable. Though they originated in China, the plum tree is praised in many poems not only for its “Wabi” but also for their significance in many practical contexts- being used, for example, in the “Sho-chiku-bai" (pine, bamboo and plum) scale, used to rank the quality of goods. 

But why has plum fascinated the Japanese people so much? One of the secrets is its withered, scaly, "wabi" appearance. It takes decades for plum trees to attain their eventual form - which some consider beautiful and some consider discomforting - as the trees do not start to twist into their characteristic pattern until 80 years old.

However, there is no tree like plum for evoking the imagination and for delivering beauty superficially packaged in ugliness. Every march for centuries has seen the Japanese admire the contrast between the haggard plum branches and the fresh, white-or-pink plum blossom. 

Kairakuen is home to about 100 species and 3,000 individual plum trees, a central part of Japanese life and culture. Many Japanese temples and shrines limit their gardens to only one type of tree, such as cherry blossoms or willows, but the size of this plum grove in Kairakuen is exceptional. 

In 2021, teamLab - led by Toshiyuki Inoko - added a new page to the history of the Mito Plum Festival, which has been held at this spot for over 120 years. Making full use of digital technology, Kairakuen at night was given a strange, ethereal alternative life, with startling illuminations and sounds. 

"We are aiming for an experience that transcends the boundaries of cognition", says Toshiyuki.

He kicked off teamLab with his friends in 2001, and it has expanded to hold permanent exhibitions and art installations all over the world - from New York, to Paris, to Beijing. 

In a nutshell, teamLab is an art collective where artists, programmers, mathematicians, architects and other experts from various backgrounds come together to present their work and philosophy in an abstract way.

Since 2002, shortly after its founding, Inoko has been working on a concept of "Digitized Nature", the idea that "digital technology can turn nature into a living art, without destroying it."

“I think that the natural shapes created over the aeons give us an experience that exceeds the limits of cognition. People often find it hard to imagine a longer time span than their own lifetime. For example, it's hard to recognize that today is continuously connected with the Edo period, but it’s easy to internalise that today is connected to yesterday. 

"But in fact, there is beauty in the continuous nature of the world. If you can see the world without boundaries, your imagination can really expand. In this Kairakuen project, I am particularly conscious of the notion of time. This vast historic garden remembers and presents back to us the centuries that have passed since it was created.

You can see the old wood express the power of time. So, it may be easier to understand our message in this natural environment, rather than the exhibitions we are doing in the city. I would be happy if visitors could experience the continuity created by nature here. "

Interactive art, in which the exhibition itself changes as the audience touches the work or enters the space, is also indispensable to teamLab's work. Such features are scattered everywhere in this exhibition, as well.  However, it seems to be a process, not a destination, for Inoko.

"I don’t exclusively stick to interactive art. I just want to create a space where I can affirm the existence of others, so the interactive style happens to be most suitable. I hope the visitors can feel they are also a part of the artwork, rather than creating a boundary between the art and them. Nothing would shine or move here if there is no one around- it would be pitch black, there would be no at (he laughs). "

A word that is often used in the tea ceremony, Ichi-go-ichi-e, a Japanese cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment, comes to mind while walking in teamLab’s Kairakuen. Along with the interactive, real-time art is one of the features of their work. 

Instead of playing back pre-produced movies, they use a computer program to project the images created at that very moment onto an object. The idea of observing the ever-changing nature of reality is put forward by this installation, which will never show the same image twice. Details like this highlight how teamLab have striven to synchronize with the garden itself.