teamLab Planets

“teamLab Planets is a museum where you move through water. It consists of 4 vast exhibition spaces at its center, and 7 works of art. The artworks are based on art collective teamLab’s concept of “Body Immersive”.

The massive Body Immersive space consists of a collection of installations in which the entire body becomes immersed in the art, and the boundaries between the viewer and the work become ambiguous.

Visitors enter the museum barefoot, and become immersed with other visitors in the vast installation spaces.”

I know there are the obvious jokes one can make about the plethora of experiential pop-up museums that have emerged in our new Instagram-able world, but today’s visit to *Planets* had me re-thinking my own cynicism.

Perhaps there is a rare beauty in these new creations that we ought to be grateful for, a kind of beauty that would not have been dreamed nor experienced had social media not been invented. I have only ever gone to these *museums* because I know it’s an hour my kids will thank me for. But today’s visit turned out to be something entirely different for me.

Unlike the highly commercial, soulless stateside pop-ups, this museum experience was wildly sensual, surprisingly dreamy and inevitably personal. Over and over again I kept asking myself, “Is this what the approach to heaven feels like?” I kept thinking of my father in his last days weeping, “If I’d known dying was such a beautiful experience, I wouldn’t have spent my entire life fearing it.” I know this is some heavy feelings-stuff for this venue, but really - it was beautiful and powerful.

Head to their website, turn-up the volume and walk with us through an Olympic sized pool of warm, milky water with calming projections of cherry blossoms and koi fish. The music was absolutely everything.

In the end, we lay on a floor for an eternity, observing the vibrant visions of petals falling and butterflies ascending, and the whole time I kept thinking: “Yes. This is exactly what heaven will be like.”