Once the viewer’s feet touched the concrete floor of the first gallery space, an installation comprising of six works was activated. Butterflies born from Flutter of Butterflies Beyond Borders, Ephemeral Life (2017) launched and spread across the darkened room traveling across the walls, through three digital wall-based works, The Void (2016), Impermanent Life (2017), and Enso (2017), toward bright blue lines of tumbling water particles which at times flowed onto the floor toward the entrance. Movement closer to the virtual water source activated flowers, which scattered across the floor ahead of the viewer. As the piece Flowers and People, Transcending Boundaries – A Whole Year Per Hour (2017) developed, over the course of an hour, seasonal flowers blossomed, grew and eventually died, leaving individual petals disappearing into the ground.

These constellations of flowers were repeated in the virtual waterfall, Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries (2017) the centrepiece of the room. Viewers could effectively enter into this water, watch the streams splash around them, and direct its flow through their touch. Given this responsibility to conduct the room in this way—inducing the cycles of butterflies, flower and water—provides insight into the collective’s environmental concerns, and its desire to enhance connections with nature. Toshiyuki Inoko once stated in an interview, that he intends for teamLab’s “themes—creativity, play, exploration, immersion, life, and fluidity—[to] seep into the broader conscience.”

This message was reiterated in the subsequent rooms featuring Dark Waves (2016) and Flowers Bloom on People (2017). Expanding on their philosophy of “ultrasubjective space”—a form of non-perspectival depiction that is derived from traditional Japanese painting—Dark Waves (2016) presented a swell of three-dimensional virtual monochrome waves surging across a six-panelled mounted screen.  In contrast with the other rooms, this piece required more contemplation, and without an overt interactive element, its inclusion in the show felt incongruous, overshadowed, and perhaps was unable to meet its ambition of connecting viewers with historic perceptions of the natural world.

The returning to performativity and playfulness in the final installation, Flowers Bloom on People (2017) brought the focus back teamLab’s strengths. Provided with white capes to increase the visibility of the piece, the entry of the participants into the dark gallery triggered the slow blooming of sunflowers upon each visitor. The flowers followed their feet and eventually created pools that spread in the direction of other visitors. A carpet of flowers in varying stages of life and death appeared shortly after the presence of the audience and faded as they left.