As teamLab opens, Takashi Kudo reveals personal connection to Abu Dhabi

The anticipated multi-sensory immersive museum opens its doors on Friday

Takashi Kudo’s ties to Abu Dhabi go beyond the launch of a new museum. As the Japanese art collective’s global brand director, he is in town for the anticipated opening of teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi in the Saadiyat Cultural District, which will welcome guests on Friday.

Kudo has a surprisingly personal connection to the UAE capital. Although born in Tokyo, he spent part of his childhood in Abu Dhabi, attending kindergarten and elementary school in the emirate while his father worked in the oil industry.

Now, more than three decades later, Kudo returns to a city that has vastly changed from the one he once knew.

A chance encounter with Mohamed Al Mubarak, chairman of DCT Abu Dhabi, was a turning point. The two met at the 2022 Culture Summit, when Kudo mentioned he had grown up in the emirate, catching Al Mubarak by surprise. That conversation sparked a friendship, with the two visiting each other’s cities, creating a connection that eventually led to the idea of bringing teamLab to Abu Dhabi.

“I really like this vision of the Saadiyat Cultural District,” Kudo tells The National. “And I said, ‘I really want to be a part of this, and our members too'.”

Although born in Japan, Takashi Kudo grew up in Abu Dhabi. Photo: teamLab

Saadiyat Cultural District is designed to be more than just a centre for creativity and innovation – it’s also a place for learning, intended to inspire future generations to engage with the arts. It’s already home to institutions such as Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House, Berklee Abu Dhabi and Manarat Al Saadiyat.

Now, teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi joins the district’s growing cultural landscape, alongside the coming Zayed National Museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, which are expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

After more than six years of development, teamLab Phenomena is finally ready to welcome its first guests. At 17,000 square metres, it is the largest teamLab in the world.

Beginnings of teamLab

The art collective began in Japan in 2001. Toshiyuki Inoko, one of teamLab’s founders, remembers the early days of the group’s formation and what they had hoped to accomplish.

“We started to explore spaces where people can physically walk inside the artwork. Spaces become one with the artwork,” says Inoko. “So, a kind of physical, spatial art that people are physically present in.

"In this world, everything is continuous, everything is connected. So nothing exists separately from each other. But in our perception, we tend to understand the world around us as existing in distinct entities.”

At 17,000 square metres, this is the largest teamLab in the world. Antonie Robertson / The National

This also explains the philosophy of the different teamLabs, which have locations around the world, including Japan, the US, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and now the UAE. Each museum has its own distinct theme. The one in Abu Dhabi follows “phenomena”.

Inoko says the idea for this project has been around for about six years, but the art pieces have been worked on for almost a decade.

“The most symbolic artworks that represent the concept are morphing continuum and levitation, void and massless, amorphous sculpture. But this concept is something that we call environmental phenomena. So the environment produces various phenomena, and then those phenomena are the artworks themselves,” he says.

“I think that things that people have been making thus far – not just limited or including art – but just things that humans have been making. We were interested in a different way of the conventional notions of what it is to make something. For example, if you put this glass in a sealed box, it will continue to exist, and that's because it maintains its own structure.”

Where visions and disciplines collide

Bringing these ideas to life, however, requires more than just vision. It takes a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary team.

“These visions for creating the installations are also in part due to having an interdisciplinary group of specialists that include CGI animators, software engineers, hardware engineers, mathematicians, architects and AI professionals," says Kudo.

“TeamLab is like exactly like its name. We are teams and we try to create something, like in laboratories. And we are very much interested in some kind of a new relationship between humans and the world.”

TeamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi took six years to complete. Antonie Robertson / The National

Kudo’s specialty in the collective lies in philosophy and literature, which he studied at Tokyo’s Waseda University, graduating in 2000. “My background is philosophy. We have engineers and we have an architect – and sometimes we speak a completely different language,” he says.

And despite what would seem like a complicated merging of minds and disciplines, he maintains that it works. It is the many different perspectives that have helped to make the collective so successful. After all, teamLab Planets in Tokyo drew in more than 2.5 million visitors in 2023, earning a Guinness World Record as “the most-visited museum dedicated to a single art group".

Of course, with such expectations there can be a lot of pressure to replicate the success in a new location. But for Kudo, it is also a meaningful homecoming – from a curious and creative child growing up in Abu Dhabi to someone who now has a role in helping to shape its cultural future.

“Before the opening, we feel very nervous and at the same time, it's a little bit exciting,” says Kudo. “We can reach people and we can share something that we think is beautiful, but maybe other people don't think that. But we cannot stop ourselves, right?”