On the waterfront of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, a mysterious white structure rises like a luminous cloud against the sky. This amorphous building offers few clues from the outside about the wonders it contains. Yet inside lies teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, the newest permanent digital art museum by the renowned Tokyo-based art collective teamLab.
Officially opened to the public on 18 April 2025, this bespoke 17,000-square-metre art space has the distinction of being the world’s largest digital museum. Where its neighbours foreground collection, scholarship and architectural symbolism, including institutions such as Louvre Abu Dhabi and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, teamLab’s takes a different position, presenting art as a lived, evolving experience rather than a sequence of curated works.
Environmental Phenomena
teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi is designed around a radical concept known as “Environmental Phenomena”. Artworks here are living phenomena shaped by their surrounding environment. In the founders’ vision, these digital artworks do not exist independently; rather, they emerge from and are sustained by elements such as light, air, water and human presence. “The environment produces the phenomena, and the environment maintains the existence of the structure,” explains teamLab’s founder Toshiyuki Inoko, suggesting that if conditions change, the artwork itself may disappear, much like a rainbow vanishing when sunlight or moisture shifts.
This approach blurs the boundary between art and nature, as installations evolve organically in response to real-time variables such as airflow and movement. Observation gives way to participation, with interactions triggering shifts in light, colour and form, or allowing virtual creatures to emerge in a continuous, dynamic interplay. Rather than being observed from a distance or protected by convention, art here is something to move through, to activate with body movement and physical immersion.
Architecture Shaped from the Inside Out
Conceived “from the inside out” to accommodate the unprecedented scale and needs of the artworks, the building that houses these phenomena is itself a marvel of design. Crafted by teamLab in collaboration with Abu Dhabi’s MZ Architects, the museum’s exterior is a low-lying, sinuous white form – an organic silhouette with fluid curves that feels at once alien and elemental. Every curve and dip of the façade reflects the shape and volume of the immense installations within, effectively making the architecture an extension of the art it contains.
This stands in contrast to a typical museum design, where the conventional approach begins with a pre-defined building into which art is placed. Here, the structure was born from the art within. Takashi Kudo, teamLab’s communications director, likens it to “a cell organism” shaped by artistic intent. Inside, guests wander through cavernous galleries and intimate chambers with no clear demarcations, mirroring teamLab’s philosophy that divisions between art, technology and nature – including those between viewer and artwork – are illusory. Ingeniously, the structure contains no visible internal columns; instead, functional elements such as projectors and sensors are concealed within towering pseudo-pillars that double as part of the installations themselves.
Immersion Without Instruction
The atmospheric sequence forming the experience begins the moment visitors step into teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi. A series of otherworldly realms unfolds, engaging all the senses without map handouts or didactic wall texts. Instead, exploration is intuitive, with each installation revealing itself as a surprise in real time.
In the first grand hall, soaring cylindrical forms rise like a forest of digital waterfalls. Cascades of virtual water flow down these pillars and across an undulating floor, only to transform into flurries of multicoloured butterflies as proximity shifts. When a hand reaches toward the falling water, the projection behaves like the real thing: streams part and swirl, responding to presence. The sense of scale is striking, with mirrored walls creating the illusion of infinite space and enveloping the scene in a vast, enchanted landscape.
Art Activated by the Body
Not all galleries are dry. In a bold departure from traditional art spaces, teamLab Phenomena features a wet zone where guests move barefoot through shallow water. In a dimly lit water garden, dozens of smooth, oval-shaped sculptures bob gently on the surface. These luminous ovoids are sensitive to touch: a gentle push causes an orb to radiate a brilliant colour and musical tone, which then reverberates to neighbouring forms in a cascading chain reaction. In this interactive pool, titled Floating Microcosms, the boundary between the virtual and the physical dissolves, with reflections doubling the illusion and the experience of feeling adrift within an infinite convergence of light and sound.
Elsewhere in the museum’s labyrinth, wind becomes the driving force. Gusts of air send swarms of silver spheres swirling through the space in turbulent eddies (Morphing Continuum), forming a vortex that gathers and disperses as air currents shift. In another hall, a massive black sphere hovers in mid-air. Known as Levitation Void, the work appears to defy gravity, its rise and fall governed by invisible atmospheric conditions. As more bodies enter the space, altering air and heat, the sphere responds with heightened movement.
The sequence continues through billowing towers of foam resembling luminous clouds (Massless Amorphous Sculpture), before opening onto a flexible mesh suspended above a 360-degree panorama of blooming flowers, coral reefs and flocks of birds. This latter spectacle, titled Biocosmos, invites movement across a netted floor while vibrant digital life unfolds in every direction. Each installation within teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi remains richly sensory and deliberately open-ended, shaped continuously by environment, motion and presence.
Final Thoughts: Another Way to Experience Art
teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi does not redefine what a museum is, nor does it displace established ways of engaging with art. Instead, it adds another dimension to how art may be experienced. Looked at from another angle, it responds to an age shaped by distraction, accelerated consumption and the constant pull of screens, quietly restoring attention.
In this sense, teamLab Phenomena expands the ways in which art may be tasted. It sits alongside traditional museums, offering a complementary mode of engagement grounded in awareness of natural elements and their influence on perception. By weaving digital creativity into the behaviours of wind, water and light, the museum creates a space where technology works in quiet dialogue with nature.
