teamLab Biovortex Opens Near Kyoto Station
The art collective's largest museum in Japan opened on 7 October 2025 with more than 50 works across 10,000 sq m, in a redevelopment district south-east of the station.
teamLab Biovortex Kyoto opened on 7 October 2025 in Minami ward, a ten-minute walk south-east of Kyoto Station. With more than 10,000 square metres of floor area and over 50 works, it is the largest permanent museum of the Tokyo art collective in Japan, ahead of teamLab Borderless at Azabudai Hills and teamLab Planets in Toyosu.
The works
teamLab makes large installations in which light, sound, water and digital projection respond to the people moving through them. The Kyoto museum includes several pieces not shown in Japan before. Massless Amorphous Sculpture fills a room with a floating mass of soap bubbles that holds its shape in mid-air, breaks when visitors walk through it and re-forms behind them. Megaliths and Transient Abstract Life and Return were new works made for the opening.
Two areas are designed for movement and for children. Athletics Forest is a three-dimensional space of slopes, nets and stepping stones lit by projection. Future Park is a studio for collective drawing, in which pictures made by visitors enter the artworks.
The title refers to a recurring idea in the collective’s work: that living things are less like fixed objects than like vortices, patterns kept in being by a continuous flow of energy and matter.
The district
The museum is the centrepiece of a city-led plan to redevelop the area south-east of the station, a district of small workshops and housing that most visitors to Kyoto never see. The project was carried out on city-owned land by teamLab with a group of Kyoto and Osaka companies, and the city presents it as a base for contemporary art and creative work. The Kyoto City University of Arts moved to a new campus nearby in 2023.
The choice of site is deliberate. Kyoto has been trying to draw visitors away from the saturated temple districts of the east and north, and a major attraction on the far side of the station serves that purpose.
Visiting
Tickets are sold for timed entry and prices vary by date, from 3,400 yen for adults. A flexible ticket, valid at any time on the chosen day, costs considerably more. Allow two to three hours. Some rooms involve water, mirrors underfoot or steep surfaces, so trousers and shoes that are easy to remove are advised. Weekday mornings are the quietest.
The museum adds a contemporary stop to a city short of them, along with the Kyocera Museum of Art in Okazaki and the Nintendo Museum in Uji. See our Kyoto guide for where to stay.