teamLab: Life Survives by the Power of Life | teamLab

Life Survives by the Power of Life was released in 2011, the year of the Great East Japan Earthquake, where an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant accident overlapped. We have continued to create this artwork since its release in 2011, and over the course of 10 years, it has developed into a new artwork in which the transition of flowers and plants throughout a whole year repeats.
Self and the environment may appear to be two things, but in reality they are one and cannot be separated. The opposite of division may not be to integrate separate things, but to realize that what appears to be two were originally one.
The blessings and threats of nature, and the blessings and threats of civilization, are continuous and connected. There is no absolute malice anywhere, and yet not everything can be settled with just pleasant words. There is no easy solution, and our emotions are complex. Even so, we at teamLab want to affirm "Life" in all situations. Life is beautiful.
And life and death also appear to be two things, but in reality they cannot be separated. Within a long period of time, life has been supported by death, and death has supported new life, as life has been continuous.
In this artwork, the character "生" (sei), which means life and living, is drawn three-dimensionally in space. The brush strokes evoke traces of life, and on the brush strokes hundreds of flowers and plants are born, bloom, scatter, and change.
The artwork is drawn through Ultrasubjective Space, the picture plane does not become a boundary that separates the world of the artwork and the space where the viewer is. The artwork space transcends the picture plane and is continuous with the space in which the viewer's body exists. Viewpoints exist in infinite numbers, and no matter where you cut out the picture plane, the space is maintained. Because all of the details continue to change constantly, the viewer's gaze never stays fixed on a single point but moves around.
By moving their gaze, the viewer continually re-composes the world of the artwork as it changes over time, and builds pictorial space within themselves.

In the background, cherry blossoms bloom and scatter, the cycle of life and death repeats itself.From the countless background points, at a certain rhythm and interval, a circle is born that grows and spreads out radially. The circle born transforms only the light and darkness of the background world.

A year’s worth of seasonal flowers bloom over the course of an hour, continuously scattering and changing.

Flowers are born, bloom, then in the course of time, they wither and die. The flowers are eternally repeating the process of life and death. When people move in front of the artwork, the flowers scatter all at once. But when people stand still, flowers bloom and grow more abundantly.

The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back: it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the work in real time. The interaction between people and the installation causes continuous change in the artwork: previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur. The picture at this moment can never be seen again.

In spring in the Kunisaki Peninsula, there are many cherry blossoms in the mountains and canola blossoms at their base. This experience of nature caused teamLab to wonder how many of these flowers were planted by people and how many were native to the environment. It is a place of great serenity and contentment, but the expansive body of flowers is an ecosystem influenced by human intervention, and the boundary between the work of nature and the work of humans is unclear. Rather than nature and humans being in conflict, a healthy ecosystem is one that includes people. In the past, people understood that they could not grasp nature in its entirety, and that it is not possible to control nature. People lived more closely aligned to the rules of nature that created a comfortable natural environment. We believe that these valleys hold faint traces of this premodern relationship with nature that once existed, and we hope to explore a form of human intervention based on the premise that nature cannot be controlled.