Teamlab Is Finally Back In Seoul With teamlab:LIFE!

After quite the hiatus from Seoul, Korea, teamLab is finally back! If you missed it a few years ago, there was actually a long term exhibition in Jamsil’s Lotte World Tower called teamLab: World that was awesome. Unfortunately, after a couple years, it closed. Anyone in Korea hoping to visit teamLab were relegated to taking a trip to “nearby” Tokyo to see teamLab: Borderless or Shanghai’s teamLab: Borderless.

If you like teamLab, you should still probably go, BUT before teamLab: World ends here in Seoul, go go go! This is NOT a long term exhibit like Borderless or World, this exhibition is only running until April so NOW is most definitely the time to head to the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, otherwise known as DDP, for an artistic adventure.

teamLab: Life, Seoul, Korea: Proliferating Immense Life

Make sure you go to teamLab: Life now!

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Basic Information To Know

When: September 25, 2020 ~ April 4, 2020

Hours: 10:00am ~ 8:00pm

CLOSED: Oct 5, Oct 19, Nov 2, Nov 16, Nov 30, Dec 14, 2020, Jan 4, Jan 18, Feb 1, Feb 15, Mar 8, 2021

Where: Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) B2 Design Exhibition Hall, 281, Eulji-ro, Jung-gu, Seoul 04566 (DDP 동대문 디자인 플라자 배움터 지하 2층 디자인 전시관(M1 Gate)
04566 서울시 중구 을지로 281)

How To Get There

By Subway: Take exit 1 or 2 from Dongdaemun History and Culture Park Station. The exits will take you right to DDP where you can find the B2 level where the entrance to the Design Exhibition hall can be found.
By Bus: Too many buses stop at DDP to list them all really. If you’re looking for the English stop, look for “Dongdaemun History and Culture Park Station” Stop.
By Car: Parking is available at DDP and you can get a 2 hours free parking ticket from the teamLab staff when you get your tickets.

Admission: Adults: W20,000; Youth 14-19: W16,000; Children 4-13: W12,000; Babies under 36 months: Free

You can purchase tickets on Naver, Interpark, Melon

What To Expect

The art collective teamLab’s newest exhibition has just opened in Seoul and features immersive artworks on a massive scale and makes use of the multi-cultural Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in a beautiful way. The exhibition explores the beauty and the continuity of life.

Nature brings us both blessings and disaster, and with the progress of civilization, there are benefits and negative implications: nature and civilization are always connected. There is no absolute malicious intent or universal beauty. There is no easy way to understand this relationship and no simple way to arrange our feelings and our sensitivities towards it. Nevertheless, we want to affirm that we are alive regardless of the situation. Life is beautiful.

Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries

Water particles seemingly rain down from the ceiling and if you take a step, the water parts, touch the wall, the water parts. The lines of the water are flattened against the walls and floor but as you step through the space and obstruct the water’s way, it parts as if you were an unmoving rock. Just wait to see where the water comes back together to continue its flow. The visuals are never replicated and will never reoccur.

Flowers and People Cannot Be Controlled But Live Together, Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year Per Hour

One of the best things about this exhibition is how much nature you can be thrust into. Missed the fields of flowers this summer as you stayed home? Couldn’t get out to a beach to jump in the water, this is that experience that will immediately bring you some calming sense of nature.

Millions of sunflowers will surround you in a continuously changing piece but they change over the course of an hour to other flowers. The entire cycle takes an hour and goes through a year’s worth of seasonal flowers and blossoms that scatter as they shift into other blooms. Flowers are born, grow, bloom, and eventually scatter and die. A cycle of life and death repeats over and over. People cause the flowers to scatter and die as they step though. Stay in one place and they will grow and expand.

Black Waves: Immersive Mass

This is an extremely calming space where the artwork has no beginning and no end and is a single, continuous wave that flows around the entire room. The exterior of the wave is also in the interior and it seamlessly move back and forth and around.

Continuous Life and Death at the Crossover of Eternity

This was a beautiful space with mirrors on either side that allowed the flowers to continue to bloom and die in an eternal cycle that goes on and on and on. Different flowers bloom and die as the seasons change so you could watch it for a long time.

Beating Earth

Get lost in a three-dimensional terrain with varying elevations that shift, writhe, and move. There was one room that shifted into this piece and the rooms edges were curved up to create a more circular room and this was really trippy when it came on. As people move, the ground and piece move and shift even more too. Watch your step!

Proliferating Immense Life

This space will make you want to sit down and feel very small beneath the massive flowers that grow right in front of you. Like the other flower exhibit, you could potentially be here for hours if you want to see every phase of the flowers that come to life and then scatter away.

The flowers’ cycle of growth repeats in perpetuity. When too many flowers have grown and taken over the view, they scatter and die making room for a different flower to grow. The artwork is not pre-recorded and is created by a computer program that continuously renders the work in real time which means it is never replicated and will never reoccur.

What To Know About teamLab

teamLab is an international art collective with an interdisciplinary group of various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world.

teamLab aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world and the new perceptions through art. In order to understand the world around them people separate it into independent entities with percieved broundaries between them. teamLab seeks to transcend these boundaries in our perception of the world, of the relationship between the self and the world, and the continuity of time. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity of life.

There have been numerous exhibitions around the world including in New York, London, Paris, Singapore, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Taipei, Melbourne, and others.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed this exhibition though found the previous one that was here in Seoul was much more interactive and as a family-lady, that one was more family-friendly. That said, this exhibition is gorgeous and we could have potentially been there for hours to see the flowers changing and changing and changing. According to my friend who has been to teamLab: Borderless in Tokyo, some of the exhibitions are the same, but there are also different ones here so if you’ve been to a different one, there is still something new for you to see and enjoy.

The only con for us was really the lack of a timely entrance but I think that was because it was the first day and the staff were clearly trying to figure out how to limit the numbers of people inside due to Covid-19.

We arrived at 9:30 and found one line to get into. When we moved forward, suddenly staff had people separating into two lines because some people had entrance tickets without a specific time to go in while others had tickets with a specific time. The only problem was that they definitely oversold the specific time tickets but couldn’t let all of those 10:00 people in because of Covid restrictions so those of us with regular entrance tickets were told we’d have to wait. That would basically mean we’d have to wait all day though so the others in the line complained a lot and then we got in in a bit of a two timed ticket people, two regular ticket people fashion. I’m sure the staff just needed the first day to figure it all out. If you need to wait a bit, just head into DDP to get some food. Or plan to do that as you may have to wait an hour or two, like us, to actually get inside.

I’m hoping that if this exhibition is popular, ultimately teamLab will open another long term exhibition here in Seoul, Korea. So, get out to this one and make it known that we love it because we do!

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