teamLab

teamLab was founded in Tokyo in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, who studied engineering at the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Engineering and graduated in 2001, the same year the group was formally incorporated. Co-founder Shunsuke Aoki and several other University of Tokyo engineering students were part of the founding circle. The group describes itself as a collective of "ultratechnologists," bringing together fine artists with programmers, CG animators, and designers to build large scale digital and interactive works.

From 2014, Pace Gallery in New York began representing and exhibiting the group's work internationally. The collective's defining project opened in 2018: teamLab Borderless, a permanent digital art museum in Odaiba, Tokyo, followed by additional permanent Borderless and SuperNature branded museums in other cities including Shanghai and Macao. The Tokyo museum reopened in a new form at Azabudai Hills in February 2024. As of mid-2026 the collective continues an active international exhibition program, including the teamLab Biovortex Kyoto museum that opened in October 2025 and the Galaxy & teamLab exhibition in Tokyo that opened in January 2026, with no indication in the record of the group having dissolved, ended, or lost an individual member in a way that would alter its status; as a collective rather than a person, questions of a single birth or death date do not apply.

Critical response to teamLab has tracked its rapid move from a Tokyo based technology collective to a global museum brand, with Pace Gallery beginning to represent and exhibit the group's work internationally from 2014, and the opening of the group's own permanent Borderless and Planets museums from 2018 onward. Coverage of the collective's rapid international growth, including a December 2024 New York Times report describing its expansion to roughly 60 venues worldwide and plans to expand into the United Arab Emirates, has increasingly centered on whether the model of spectacle driven, ticketed installation constitutes a lasting artistic contribution or primarily a commercial attraction. That tension, between spectacle and depth, runs through most serious writing on the collective.

teamLab's documented auction history is thin: the only clearly documented public sale identified in available auction records is Universe of Water Particles, which sold for HK$1,875,000 (about USD 240,000) at Phillips Hong Kong on 26 November 2017, a sale Phillips described at the time as the first appearance of a digital work by the collective at auction. No later sale surpassing this price has been confirmed. By contrast, teamLab's public reach is enormous: reporting in late 2024 put annual attendance at teamLab Planets Tokyo at roughly 2.5 million visitors, underscoring that the collective's commercial center of gravity sits in permanent museums and ticketed installations rather than in the secondary auction market.

teamLab has no published catalogue raisonne, and authentication for its installation based and edition based works runs through the teamLab studio itself and through its representing galleries, Pace Gallery, Martin Browne Contemporary, and Ikkan Art. The auction record is thin, with only one confirmed public sale identified to date, so it should be read as a single data point rather than a trend line. The more important signal for a collector is institutional: teamLab's revenue and cultural footprint are driven overwhelmingly by permanent museums and large scale commissions rather than by object sales, which makes its market structurally different from that of a traditional painter or sculptor and harder to benchmark against conventional auction based metrics.