Kyoto’s New TeamLab Biovortex – New Immersive Art in Kansai チームラボ京都 Sightseeing in Japan
Hi everyone, David here! Welcome back to the
channel! Thanks for coming back for another video or welcome if it’s your first one. Thanks
for joining us! How are you? I’m doing OK. I’ve just done a lot of walking this weekend.
This was supposed to be the nice rest weekend after the Expo’s finished and I’ve been really
busy last week. I was really tired. I thought, oh, take it easy. No, it hasn’t happened at all.
I did a kind of fairly pointless stamp rally thing for the Expo last weekend. And today I went to
Kyoto, which is the topic of today’s video. I went to see the brand-new TeamLab
BioVortex, which has just opened in Kyoto. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today.
I’m going to show you around there, see what kind of exhibitions you can see inside. For those
of you who don’t know, Team Lab is a very famous art collective born in Japan, I think
about 20 years ago. And their specialty these days is making kind of large-scale immersive
artwork places to visit. It’s hard to describe them really. It’s not like an art gallery,
you’re actually inside the art. It’s interactive. Sometimes they’re doing all sorts of strange
things with lights and mirrors and whatnot. It’s one of those experiences that is
a little bit unique. There are several locations in Japan which I’ve shown you on this
channel before. I think I’ve shown you the one in Fukuoka. the one in Osaka, the one in Nagai
Park, the botanical garden, and also I think one of the ones in Tokyo as well I’ve shown you as
well last year. So please check those out. In fact, I did actually make a whole video about Team
Labs in general, like a sort of a digest version. So, please check that out if you can’t make it
to Kyoto. There are a few more extra ones as well. I think there’s one in Okinawa as
well now. And Oh you’re testing me now. There’s one in Higashi Osaka as well, which, I’ve got a
flyer for this one. I think it’s some kind of cafe with a little garden. So, it’s a little
bit smaller scale than the other ones. But kind of an interesting concept. I’m going
to head there at some point. But today, yes, we’re heading to the BioVortex, which
has just opened, as you can see, on the 7th of October. And yeah, what’s this about?
This kind of cloud machine in the middle? I’ll show you that and all the other
artworks that we’re going to see inside. But BioVortex has just opened near Kyoto
station. It’s only about a 5 or 10 minute walk from Kyoto station. I’ll tell you
about how to get there a little bit later, and tickets and all that sort of stuff
and advice. So yeah, I’ll just get straight into it. I’m going to hand over to myself and show you
my usual montage. So, please like this video, subscribe to the channel. I’ve got lots of more
stuff like this. Leave a comment or a question and share this channel to anyone who’s looking
for some ideas what to do in Kyoto. Especially if it’s a rainy day as well, this is a good option
because it’s all indoors. So yeah, there we go. Please enjoy this and I’ll see you on the
other side. OK. Here we are at TeamLab BioVortex Kyoto, the new TeamLab facility.
And we’re in Kyoto, so we want a nice elegant entrance. We have a nice bonsai tree here and some calligraphy. You can download an app too, that can help you find out about the artworks.
I recommend doing that beforehand because the app can be a little bit heavy sometimes. It
works with Bluetooth as well. And then we’re in. We’re into the dark alleyways that are famous
in TeamLabs and a nice floral entrance hall. This is like the main entrance area.
So, a lot of artwork areas branch off from here and the beautiful floral displays
make way for waterfalls. It does gradually change into different kinds of displays.
Lovely waterfalls there. So, there’s a lot of different routes sprouting from this
main room. So, let’s go and take a look around. This is all on the first floor, I think, as well.
So, first of all, you can see the kind of lantern room, which I heard is called the Year in
the Mountains, the Forest of Resonating Lamps. So, you can see all the different kinds
of lamp. You’re only allowed to stay in here for about 3 minutes, so take your selfies quickly.
Enjoy the moment – exactly one moment and you’re out again. There’s this nice projection
mapping room as well with the Kanji flying down from the ceiling. And it’s interactive too. So
if you touch the kanji something will happen. I’m going to touch the tree kanji and a tree will
sprout magically from my hands. You can see all sorts of things. There’s birds and butterflies.
There’s rainbows, thunder. So please check it out and try all these different kanji by touching
them. So we like the interactivity in these displays. Nice traditional art here as I was
waiting for one of the main displays which is the giant, well, the BioVortex itself. So first
you’re in this dark room with lots of silver balloons which eventually
get sucked up by the air vents and turn into a BioVortex. If you didn’t know
what that was, here we are. It’s a little tornado of balloons. You can actually get quite up
close to it as well. You can’t get underneath it, but you can really get up close and personal
with this little tornado. And eventually they switch off the vents and you can just
mess around with the balloons. But you do have to end up going to the side of the room and
the entire length of the room becomes another BioVortex going laterally. So, you get this huge
vortex and eventually the winds pick up again and the tornado will start up. Yeah, a very
interesting room. A little bit dark and difficult to film because the balls kept hitting the camera
but there we go. Lots of vortices to enjoy. Now, this feels a little bit old hat now
because this is the Infinite Crystal World. I saw this in my very first TeamLab. So you
can just enjoy taking selfies in there, although you always end up seeing someone peeking behind the beaded curtains, but very cool. Anyway there’s another projection room here.
This actually made me feel a bit sick because you’re standing still, but the whole room
feels like it’s turning around. I think this is something about crows being chased. I forgot what the name of this one was. And some other miscellaneous artwork using ink to mimic
water and blooming flowers as well. A nice little rest area here. I think that took the…
sorry there’s one more room. There’s a kind of planetarium-looking place. You lay down on the
floor enjoy the movement of all the birds. I think that’s most of the first floor taken care of.
We’re going to go upstairs next to this rather soupy looking murky slime. You can just
enjoy this one. Just taking a look at it. But you can also interact with it too.
If you line up for a little bit, you can trudge your way through the metallic mud using the
special rental wellies. So you’re not going to get wet feet. Although my socks did feel a bit
kind of squeaky and shiny the rest of the day. I don’t know what was going on there. Finally
I got my chance to step into the murk. iIt’s a little bit slippery as well. I thought I was
going to slip over in the mud, but you can enjoy wiggling your feet around and making strange
patterns in the mud. There we go, toxic waste. It was kind of fun for a few minutes. The guy
next to me couldn’t get his shoes off either afterwards. Then, the main event is another Bio
Vortex of sorts. This is the foam bubble room. It feels like a Willy Wonka’s factory thing.
So you can find little natural caves in this soap bubble foam and little clouds floating
around as well. There’s the little bubble machine in the back spewing bubbles out for us to
play with. Otherwise, just enjoy. You get to wear a mask as well. Be careful if you’re wearing
nice clothes because this does get all over you. They do get you with a little blow dryer at the
end so you can get most of it off, although my my hands felt all soapy and horrible, but it was
quite fun. And up to the next floor, we’ve got the crystalline pillars which again go through
various transformations. You can see different seasons of those flowers. And there’s
kind of a moss garden going on in this room as well. A few little offshoot rooms,
including this reflective globe thing as well, which is interesting. If you’ve been to the Tokyo
ones, you might recognize these eggs. They like to have these around the TeamLabs. This
is a bit of a staple. You can push them as well, they can rock. Don’t punch them, though. Just
push them. Some little kid was going around rocking them all. There we go. Lots of nice
Weebles wobbling, but not falling down. Back in that main room, we’ve got some crystals. Now
we’ve got small organic crystals, and you can take some videos there. Take some selfies
in the little crystal garden. I love crystals. And this is the Dark Sun. I think the Massless
Sun, which occasionally lights up. Anyway, yeah, very restful. And this room, I don’t know
what it was called, but there were these wires being illuminated from all different sides.
It was really quite hypnotic, really. It was very interesting to visit. It doesn’t really show up
very well on the camera, though, sadly. There’s this weird sound room. They’re doing
the bass sounds from the floor. So, you can see the little water puddles vibrating. Like if you
see water on a speaker, for example, that was kind of cool. And then finally upstairs,
you get to the Athletic Forest, including these rather interesting flamelike structures. And
it’s a bit more physical here. You can climb across these bouncy balls like yoga balls.
Try to match all the colours. But yeah, don’t roll your ankle. There’s trampolines.
Trampampolines! You can enjoy distorting the space-time continuum with a trampoline.
And this kind of… I don’t know, a little walkway challenge. The big blocks at the back look easy,
but they’re actually a bit wobbly. And also this projection mapping nature zone. I’m going
to talk to you about that in a moment. You can actually design your own characters and colour
them in. And sadly, you can squish them as well. So, I made my salamander. Salamander Jack,
I called him. I didn’t have any other ideas. And brought him to life. And if he eats a snake, he’s
going to multiply. So, go for it. Eat the snake! You can do it! There he goes. He’s multiplied.
Unfortunately, they’re a little bit slow-moving, the salamanders. So, they did tend to get
squished by people. Oh, there he’s dead. So, here’s the last of the tribe, it’s been
wiped out sadly by the tourists. And some fun little bouncy balls with projections on
them, too. So, the top level was very physical. You can enjoy yourself. This was really
hard. I had really painful legs the day after this, climbing up these little wobbly cable things.
And finally, a little interactive area. You can write on the walls with special pens. You can
enjoy these weird little lemming creatures getting pushed around by all sorts of animals.
You can cook some fish and just interact. It was kind of fun. But anyway, that was fun. I enjoyed
TeamLabs. These people are getting cooked, So it’s time to head back to my studio. OK, so
what did you think of TeamLab BioVortex? I had a lot of fun. This was a lot bigger than
I expected actually. For the price it was, I think there was more content inside than the
one in Tokyo, which is a bit more expensive. But I was very satisfied with my experience.
There are a couple of things that I’ve seen already in TeamLabs, like the bouncy ball
things you have to jump on, and the eggs, they the kind of fairy light egg sculptures.
But yeah, also interesting structures and sculptures inside. And of course the
BioVortex was the star of the show, the big ball pond hurricane.
That was really interesting. A little bit hard to film though because I kept getting hit
with all these little shiny balls. Also the foam pits. I never went to Ibiza in the 90s
like some people did with their foam parties. I feel like I’ve had that experience
now a little bit. I wish they would have given you a little bit more warning about this.
So here, this is your warning. Just don’t wear your best clothes! And also maybe leave that
bag in the locker. I thought we just had to leave the bags in the locker if they’re too
big or they’re too heavy. I thought I was OK. But then I had to walk through all this foam. So
I don’t know. They do kind of use blow dryers to get you clean when you go out. But yeah,
I had this horrible like soapy sticky feeling for the rest of the day. So yeah, I don’t know.
But that was interesting as well. All the other displays were cool as well, like the projection
mapping things, the interactive stuff was good as well. And the whole addition
of the Athletic Forest on the top was really fun as well. I was really running out of energy
by the end. You can draw, you can be creative, you can exercise yourself, like climbing and
balancing on things. Yeah, it was fun for adults and kids. Of course, kids are going to
love this, too. They might get a little bit bored in the more artistic moments, but there were
plenty of kids terrorizing everybody else. So there we go. That was TeamLabs. I hope
you enjoyed that. Now, how do you get there? Well, it’s pretty easy. You just take the JR line
to Kyoto station. If you’re not coming by JR, you can also get there by the Shinkansen
as well, which is kind of JR too. So that all converges on Kyoto station. If you’re
coming by some of the other routes like Hankyu, Kintetsu or Keihan, then you’ll need to make it to
Kyoto station somehow, probably just joining the subway, I guess, is the easiest way, the
Kyoto Subway. And then from there, it’s about a 5 or 10-minute walk. Don’t do what I did and go out the main exit, like the central gate with Kyoto Tower in front of you. That’s the wrong
way. Don’t go out that way! Go out the back exit, I guess that’s the South Exit. Otherwise you’re
going to be on the wrong side and it’s a bit of a pain to get around Kyoto
station because there’s a lot of train lines. There’s not just an easy tunnel underneath.
So, it took me a little bit of course adjusting to find my way to the south side. So yeah, make
it easy on yourself and go out of the South gate. Don’t go out of the central gate with
Kyoto Tower. Now, as for tickets, this costs, I think it was… 4,, was it 4,000 yen?
4,400 yen, I think it was. Which, I think was — Oh, actually, thinking about it, I think
that’s the same price as the one in Tokyo. But you do get a lot of content. I stayed in there
for about 3 hours. And even then I probably could have spent a bit more time if I was at a
leisurely pace. My advice is to book online. They do have a fairly limited amount of on-the-
day tickets. I left the building around 12:30 and they’d already sold out for the day. So, don’t
leave it to chance. Probably try to book an earlier slot as well because there’s no exit time. So, you can just hang around as long as you like. But as you might imagine, as you get in early
in the morning, there’s not going to be that many people and people who are hanging around
are going to get joined by all the other people. So it’s going to get progressively more crowded
during the day. So, I recommend getting one of those early slots. Book in way in advance if you
can. And that’s my advice! So, South Exit, book early! Don’t chance it with the on-the-day
tickets because you might get disappointed. OK. I think that’s everything I wanted to share,
So, definitely check those out. Check out my other videos, too. just search TeamLabs
on my channel. You can find the digest video. There’s also the one in Tokyo,
which was part of my big trip in Tokyo video. Same with Fukuoka as well. And, then the
Osaka botanical garden, very nice. I did check that out. I’ve actually done a whole
walking video. You can walk your way through all of that. Not many people watched it though,
sadly. So, please check that out! Help me out! OK. There we go. So, please like this video,
subscribe to the channel, leave a comment or a question, share this channel to anybody else who wants to come to Japan, especially Kyoto. And you can leave me a Super Like if you like,
help me keep the lights on. That would help me a lot. But anyway, thank you very much, I hope
you enjoyed this video, see you again. Bye-bye!
This month I visited Kyoto’s brand new TeamLab facility, TeamLab Biovortex, which opened in October 2025. I’ll take you on a tour of the various art pieces inside, and give some advice about how to get there and about tickets.
TeamLab is an international art collective founded in 2001, and created innovative art installations combining art, technology and nature. But they aren’t usual art galleries, you are invited into an immersive art space, sometimes with interaction with textures, plants, even knee-deep water! TeamLab BioVortex Kyoto is notable for its tornado of balloons, as well as its room of soap bubble clouds.
Do you have any recommendations or requests for other things you’d like me to make a video of? Let me know in the comments! I have finally reached 1000 subscribers now, thank you! Help me get even more by sharing this channel and favourite videos with your friends!
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#japan #kyoto #teamlab #teamlabs #art #teamlabbiovortex #biovortex #sightseeing
#日本 #京都 #チームラボ京都 #チームラボプ #観光
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