Editor’s note: Our OFFF Barcelona 2026 conversations continue. Following Onur Senturk on the compulsion to create, Tim Thompson of RevThink sits down with Sakurako “Saka” Naka of teamLab, the Tokyo art collective behind Borderless and Phenomena, the morning after her talk on the main stage. What follows is Tim’s account of the conversation.
Saka arrived with a laptop and an apology. “I didn’t prepare myself at all,” she said, “because I think it’s very uninteresting, for the most part.” We were outside Disseny Hub on the last morning of the festival, in the sun, a few hours before she had to be back on a plane to Tokyo. By the time an OFFF producer came to find her, nearly an hour later, I had stopped asking questions and she had stopped apologizing.
I came to the conversation wanting to understand a structure. How does an art collective become big enough to open permanent museums on three continents without turning into a company, or at least without feeling like one? I left with something closer to a philosophy of making, and with a standing invitation to Tokyo that I intend to use.
teamLab, Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather. teamLab Borderless, Tokyo. © teamLab
A laboratory for a team
The story begins about 25 years ago with five friends leaving graduate school. One of them, Toshiyuki Inoko, whom everyone at teamLab calls Toshi, wanted to make things. “Art 25 years ago is not sustainable,” Saka said, then caught herself. “It’s not even now.” So by day the five built technology for companies, and whatever revenue came in went into artworks. “That’s how we self-sustained.”
That arrangement never went away. It grew into two pillars. One side, which they call digital solutions, builds apps and systems for postal services, banks, and airlines, and now works at a nationwide scale in Japan. The other side is the art collective. Three of the four friends who started with Toshi are still there, and they run the digital solutions side “so that Toshi can just focus on making things.”
The name is literal. “When teamLab started, the reason why it’s called teamLab is, it’s a laboratory for a team.” I asked whether that made the team the experiment. She laughed. “Not necessarily a human experiment.”
Nobody has a title
I tried to find the org chart and could not. When I asked whether Toshi functioned as a creative director, Saka paused over the comparison. “I honestly don’t know what creative directors are. We don’t have titles within teamLab.” What they have instead is what she calls a gathering of specialists. Artists, but also mathematicians, software and hardware engineers, architects, and a botanical team. “Are you serious?” I asked. She was. They work with living flowers.
Work forms around an artwork, not around a department. An idea begins, often with Toshi, and the group that gathers around it evolves by need: which specialty is required to make this, who should be experimenting on it. Some of those series have been running for more than 15 years, each iteration asking the same question in a new form, such as whether light can become a three-dimensional sculpture in space. “We’re always interested in just keeping on making,” she said. An exhibition is the moment to ask what the team is interested in right now, and what it wants to show.
When a museum or exhibition approaches, a different kind of member steps in. “We have these members called catalysts,” she said. “They bring everyone together.” I pointed out that this sounded like a title. “It’s more of an adjective.” The catalyst knows every engineer and architect working on every artwork and pulls them into the plan for the larger space.
“We don’t have titles within teamLab.”
Everyone is full time. “It’s not a drop-in, drop-out situation, because there’s always something to be making.” And the wall between the two pillars is porous. If an artwork needs an insight that lives on the digital solutions side, someone walks over. “People make friends.”
teamLab Borderless, MORI Building Digital Art Museum, Azabudai Hills, Tokyo. © teamLab
Every piece of wood is different
teamLab does everything in-house, from the first experiment to the last projector. Artworks start small in the Tokyo studio, scale up in large warehouses far outside the city, and get finished on site, where the team spends weeks working out corners and angles. “There’s so much you discover just using your hands to do things,” Saka said. “You never really know until you’re physically in the space.”
The discovery does not stay with one person. It is shared across the team and carried into the next artwork, so the knowledge compounds. Her example for this had nothing to do with projectors. In old Japanese architecture, she said, the craftsmen who shaved the wooden beams for the great temples were also part of deciding what the structure would look like. “Every piece of wood is different. So the people working with the actual material could also have an input in the larger structure.” That separation came later. “It’s not whether it’s good or bad. It’s just something different that has happened.”
The Tokyo studio is built to keep that input flowing. One floor is entirely open, a lot of tables and no walls, with only two glassed rooms so that overseas calls are possible. Everyone is working on several things at once, so when a question about a space comes up in a meeting, the person who can answer it is usually within reach. “You can tap someone over very easily.”
Somewhere in here I offered her my starfish metaphor, the one about a creature with no brain whose parts still agree on a direction, and how a whole school of them will move together with no visible way of communicating. She was polite about it. “In some of our artworks there are schools of fish. Or birds. It’s some communication that we don’t fully understand. There’s so much that we don’t know.”
The flowers look back
Then she opened the laptop, and the conversation stopped being about structure.
She showed me the garden first. More than 13,000 living orchids fill a room in Tokyo, suspended in the air with no soil, because most orchids can absorb water from the air. “They found another way to live on this planet,” she said. When you walk in, the flowers hang low. Stand still, and the ones around you begin to float upward, opening a space around your body. Walk slowly and the space moves with you. If someone enters from the other side, your two spaces merge.
teamLab, Floating Flower Garden: Flowers and I are of the Same Root, the Garden and I are One, 2015-, interactive installation. © teamLab
The work comes from a Zen saying about looking at a flower as though looking at a dream. “We know in our brains that we’re connected to nature,” she said. “But it’s difficult to recognize it as that.” The orchids are the attempt. “If you stand for a while, the flowers almost look back at you.”
“If you stand for a while, the flowers almost look back at you.”
teamLab, Floating Flower Garden. More than 13,000 living orchids, rooted in air. © teamLab
You cannot put a whirlpool in a box
Earlier I had given her a theory of mine about the four stages of a creative career, which ends with the collector, the person whose value lies in what they gather. Saka came back to it an hour later with a better answer than mine, and it started with a whirlpool.
Humans, she said, have mostly made objects. Our cities are full of them. But in the south of Japan, where Toshi grew up, there are some of the largest whirlpools in the world, and a whirlpool is not an object. The water inside it is exactly the same as the water outside it. What makes it exist is an order of energy, a flow passing through. “You could not scoop it up and put it in a silver box. It would stop existing the moment you tried.”
teamLab, Light Vortex. teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi. © teamLab
That idea became a series called Environmental Phenomena, and a building. teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, developed with the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi and Miral, is full of sculptures that are made by the environment itself: a column of spheres that rises about five meters and reads as a solid vertical form from across the room, held up by nothing but air flow. You can walk into it and it keeps existing. You cannot take it home. “It’s inseparable from the environment,” Saka said. “As long as this environment exists, these sculptures will continue to emerge.” I asked who at teamLab commissioned the content. “We decided everything that went in there.”
teamLab, Morphing Continuum. A sculpture of spheres held in place by the flow of air alone. teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi. © teamLab
No map
Borderless, teamLab’s permanent museum in Tokyo, moved into a new space in 2024, and the next one is going to Hamburg. There is no map and no route. You walk in and out of rooms and stay as long as you like, and the artworks do the same. They leave one room, travel the corridors, take another form, and overlap with each other. They also respond to whoever is there. The butterflies are born from people, so at the start of the day, before anyone arrives, there are no butterflies. Touch one and it dies. “It’s just one world,” she said, “and it depends on who’s there with you and how they’re behaving.”
teamLab, Flutter of Butterflies Beyond Borders. teamLab Borderless, Tokyo. © teamLab
This is where she talked about beauty, and it is the line I keep returning to. People usually call something beautiful when it has been separated from the rest of the world, a single flower, a single ring. Inside Borderless, where everything is changing because of you and because of the strangers beside you, that reflex falls away. “At one point you start to feel like it’s the whole that’s beautiful. The fact that the world is continuous, and that we live in this continuity, that’s the object of beauty.”
“The fact that the world is continuous, and that we live in this continuity, that’s the object of beauty.”
I thought of a field of poppies. You can photograph it, or pick one flower and carry it home, and either might be lovely on its own. Neither is the field. The field includes its scale, its surroundings, and the fact that you were standing in it.
A different way of seeing
The last thing she showed me was a wall of blooming flowers, and the hardest idea of the hour. Most of what we look at now has passed through a lens, and a lens fixes a point of view. “When your perspective is fixed, you don’t need your body,” she said. That is not a bad thing, she was careful to add. It made objectivity possible. But teamLab has spent years on the opposite problem: how to turn something three-dimensional into two dimensions without discarding the body, so that what you see feels like it shares your space.
teamLab, People Don’t See the World as through a Camera. The letters at the entrance of teamLab Borderless only rise toward you through a lens. © teamLab
They call the answer Ultrasubjective Space, a logical construct for flattening a scene without fixing the viewer’s eye. In the room, you cannot tell whether the flowers are blooming on your side of the wall or beyond it, and people drift toward them without deciding to. I kept asking about the mechanism, whether there were layered planes, whether something moved. She kept returning me to how the image was built. “People don’t look at the world like a lens does in the first place.” Pre-modern East Asian scrolls and folding screens, she pointed out, were never drawn in Western perspective. “It’s probably just how they saw.” When I asked whether this was a technical breakthrough or a creative one, she gave the most teamLab answer of the morning. “Sometimes things just don’t exist, and we just have to make it up.”
teamLab, Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together. teamLab Borderless, Tokyo. © teamLab
Today, then tomorrow
I spend my working life with creative business owners, and most of them are being taught, including by the speakers at this festival, how to become commercial artists. teamLab did it the other way around. They built a commercial engine so the art would never have to ask permission, and 25 years later the engine is still running and the art is still the point.
People ask Toshi about his plans in five years, in ten. Saka says the answer never changes. “I just want to keep making something today. And then tomorrow, and the day after, and I’ll just keep doing that.” She smiled. “And then one day I’ll die.”
That sounds like a plan. The OFFF film crew came for her a minute later. She gave me her number for Tokyo, and I have never been to Tokyo. She is going to be the reason.
“I just want to keep making something today. And then tomorrow, and the day after.”
teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Cultural District. © teamLab
Interview and words: Tim Thompson, RevThink, recorded at OFFF Barcelona 2026
Featured guest: Sakurako “Saka” Naka, teamLab, Tokyo (teamLab does not use titles, and neither does she)
Recorded: April 18, 2026, Disseny Hub Barcelona
Website: teamlab.art
Instagram: @teamlab
Series: OFFF Barcelona 2026 conversations, part two of four