Inside teamLab Abu Dhabi, the Art Collective’s Most Ambitious Project Yet

On the waterfront of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, a cloud-like structure has risen. White and amorphous, the building offers few clues from the outside about what lies within. This is Phenomena, the newest permanent museum by the Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, opening to the public on April 18th. At 17,000 square meters, Phenomena is now the world’s largest digital art museum. Until now, that record was set by the collective’s earlier art space, Borderless, in Tokyo, at 10,000 square meters.

In many ways, Phenomena, which is based on a new concept that the collective calls “Environmental Phenomena,” is the culmination of everything teamLab has been exploring over the past two-plus decades. The artist collective, which was founded in Tokyo in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, is now estimated to have between 500 and 1,000 members globally (the collective prefers not to officially disclose its headcount). Their members include artists, programmers, engineers, animators, architects, and mathematicians. Describing themselves as “ultratechnologists,” teamLab creates wildly popular immersive digital installations that blur the boundaries between art, science, technology, and the natural world.

In 2024, their Tokyo museum, teamLab Planets, was recognized by Guinness World Records as the most visited museum dedicated to a single art collective, with over 2.5 million visitors in a single year. The new museum, Phenomena, reflects not only the collective’s artistic maturity, but also the dramatic advancements in digital tools and techniques—technologies that simply didn’t exist when the group first began (although teamLab largely creates its own tech). Just as crucially, the museum is the result of a level of ambition that requires substantial resources and institutional support, which teamLab finally has access to. According to the collective, the museum is the most fully realized expression of its vision to date.

Designed by the Abu Dhabi–based firm MZ Architects in collaboration with teamLab, the new structure has some formidable neighbors: the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. As the emirate grows in stature as an art world hub, Phenomena is yet another destination in the region for art lovers.

While Phenomena aligns with the broader ambitions of Saadiyat Island, it stands out architecturally. The building’s fluid, organic form feels at once alien and elemental. Every curve and contour has been sculpted in direct response to the conceptual and technical demands of the artworks it contains.

In an interview with Artsy, Takashi Kudo, teamLab’s communications director, likened the building itself to “a cell organism” shaped by the artistic and technological demands of each installation. “The interior is incredibly varied,” he said. “The heights shift, the shapes change—each room was formed around the specific environmental and artistic needs of the works themselves. In the end, the building became something that almost feels alive.”

Indeed, this is not a museum into which art has simply been placed: It is a museum born from the art it contains. The structure was conceived from the inside out and the outside in, mirroring teamLab’s core philosophy: that boundaries—between spaces, people, and phenomena—are illusions.

Unlike the mostly projection-based interiors of teamLab’s earlier museums, here, the building and the artworks form a cohesive system. teamLab describes this system as “living” in the sense that many of the works are directly influenced by environmental conditions such as humidity, airflow, light, and the presence or movement of visitors. “Some works in this museum can only appear here,” Kudo explains. “They depend entirely on the room’s environment—its shape, its humidity, its stillness or motion. If you removed them from this context, they wouldn’t manifest.”

Visitors enter without instructions. There are, in general, no guides, no wall texts or maps to follow. Instead, upon entering the museum, a single artwork greets the viewer in a darkened space: A small pool of water that shimmers faintly. When the viewer touches the water, a unique geometric mosaic appears on its surface. “That fleeting moment is key,” Kudo said. “It can only happen in this space, under these exact conditions. That’s what Phenomena is.”

This responsiveness informs the entire museum experience. In a vast, central hall, towering cylindrical structures are wrapped in cascading digital waterfalls—one of teamLab’s signature motifs. “We’ve shown waterfalls many times before,” Kudo said, “but usually as projections on flat surfaces. Here, they fall around physical columns, through which a depth exists that your body can actually feel.”

Like teamLab’s earlier museums and exhibitions, Phenomena draws power from its scale and spectacle, though here, the effect is even more pronounced. Here, installations are shaped by real-time natural and biological variables, allowing the space to respond together as an evolving ecosystem. In one quiet gallery, softly glowing “ovoids”—a recurring form in the collective’s visual language—float on the surface of a mirror-like pool. “They’ve appeared in earlier works,” Kudo said, “but this is the first time they’re truly free-floating. Their movement becomes something less predictable, more…sentient. They feel like living objects.”