Hamburg's HafenCity district will become home to Europe's first teamLab venue when the UBS Digital Art Museum opens in 2026, bringing the boundary-breaking digital art collective to the continent for the first time.
Housed in a purpose-built 6,500sqm space with 12m-high ceilings in Hamburg's HafenCity, the museum will showcase teamLab Borderless as its centrepiece.
This museum experience dissolves the traditional boundaries between artworks, allowing digital installations to flow between rooms, interact with each other and respond to visitors' movements.
teamLab, Infinite Crystal World © teamLab
teamLab, Light Vortex, Courtesy teamLab Borderless Tokyo © teamLab
The exhibition transforms spaces into living canvases where projections create forests of hanging lights, cascading waterfalls and blooming flowers that react to human presence. Rather than observing art from a distance, visitors become part of the installation itself, with their movements influencing the ever-changing digital landscapes around them.
The exhibition comes from Tokyo-based art collective teamLab, which creates immersive, interactive and technologically driven digital art experiences. Its venues across Asia and the Middle East have already broken visitor records, holding Guinness World Records for the world's most visited museum dedicated to a single artist group, attracting 2.5 million visitors between April 2023 and March 2024.
teamLab, Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as well: Cosmic Void, Courtesy teamLab Borderless Jeddah © teamLab
teamLab, Forest of Flowers and People: Lost, Immersed and Reborn © teamLab
Tech entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs, founder of career networking site XING, founded the project in Germany after experiencing teamLab's Tokyo venue.
The ambitious undertaking includes hundreds of projectors and cutting-edge technology to create a completely new level of sensory engagement.
teamLab, Forest of Resonating Lamps - One Stroke, Fire, Courtesy teamLab Borderless Jeddah © teamLab
Main entry of the UBS Digital Art Museum with media facade, Rendering © Thorsten Bauer, Studio Bauer
The museum is already selling advance tickets; find them here. It represents part of a growing immersive entertainment market estimated to be worth more than US$400 billion worldwide by 2030, according to Grand View Research.
For Hamburg and the wider region, the museum represents a significant cultural investment, positioning the city as a destination for innovative art experiences that merge technology with creativity in ways that would have been impossible just decades ago.
Tokyo's digital art museum, TeamLab Planets, is a surreal digital museum where visitors can walk through water or become one with a flower-filled garden.
The museum-cum-creative space has undergone a dramatic transformation, reopening with a substantial expansion that promises to redefine interactive art experiences for visitors.
Not only has it increased its footprint by 50%, introducing several groundbreaking new spaces that blend art, technology, and education, but visitors can now explore three major new areas that push the boundaries of artistic interaction.
The Athletic Forest offers a multi-dimensional creative space where physical movement becomes art, while the Catching and Collecting Extinct Forest provides a unique opportunity for visitors to engage with digital representations of extinct animals.
Future Park emerges as a collaborative zone encouraging co-creation and collective artistic expression.
More than 20 new artworks have been added to the museum's already impressive collection, featuring TeamLab's signature immersive digital installations. The expansion also includes a Sketch Factory, allowing guests to purchase personalised merchandise created within the artwork spaces.
"This renovation represents our continued commitment to creating transformative artistic experiences," says a spokesperson for TeamLab. "We're not just displaying art – we're inviting visitors to become part of the creative process."
The reopened museum maintains its location in Tokyo's Toyosu district, promising to attract both local and international art enthusiasts. Visitors can expect to be transported into intricate, interactive digital landscapes that blur the lines between viewer and artwork.
Tickets and further information are available through the TeamLab Planets website.
