Review: Transcending Boundaries At Pace Gallery

Tokyo collective teamLab have garnered a solid reputation in the art world for their interactive installations that fuse art with modern technology, encouraging viewer interaction.

Comprised of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, and mathematicians, their work is visually stimualting and succeeds in transporting the viewer into an alternate universe, where art becomes reality.

Their latest work, Transcending Boundaries, descended upon London's Pace Gallery on 25th January and will feature previously unseen work.

The Pace Gallery is located just around the corner from the glitzy, designer shops of Bond Street and has galleries worldwide in influential cities such as Paris, New York, and Beijing. 

Transcending Boundaries is housed in three rooms to the right of the main entrance. Entering through a black curtain you are immediately submerged within the art. Eight works are spread throughout the rooms aiming to "explore the role of digital technology in transcending the physical and conceptual boundaries that exist between different artworks".

Walking into the first room, the largest containing six of the works, the first thing you observe is the virtual waterfall that descends down the wall from the ceiling, extending out across the floor. 

Encouraged to touch the wall, the water spreads out from beneath your fingers and hands and begins to move in a different direction.

On the other walls, hundreds of yellow, purple and pink butterflies flutter along as flowers bloom across your feet below. The movement of these are influenced both by the work, with which they interact, and also the viewers. If you touch a butterfly they die and fall gracefully to the ground. Perhaps a representation of the fragility of life?

In the second room sits the work entitled Dark Waves. The waves were hand drawn after the collective observed and then calculated the "interactions of hundreds of thousands of particles." The waves are then fed into a computer programme that transforms the waves into a 3D, pulsing, oceanic abyss. Standing in front of the work gives you a sense of being engulfed by the waves.

This particular piece aims to get the viewer to question "why premodern people sensed life in rivers and oceans….perhaps something can be discovered by fusing the fixed objective world of today's common knowledge with the subjective world of premodern people".

The final room is pitch black hole, until you enter it, adorned in a white shawl. As each person stands deathy still flowers begin to bloom on them, blossoming on their bodies and feet. As more people enter the room the flowers spread out towards them. As soon as you move away from the flowers they begin to wilt and die.

This installation is entirely dependent on the viewer's movements and changes continuously, so no sequence will ever be the same throughout the entirety of the run.

Transcending Boundaries will be at Pace Gallery until 11th March. 

For more information and tickets head HERE.