teamLab Digitizes 180-Year-Old Kairakuen Garden with Light Installations

teamLab's Digitized Kairakuen Garden opens February 1, 2022, at Kairakuen Garden in Mito, Japan, one of the country's three largest gardens, celebrating its 180th anniversary. Eight interactive light installations merge with the park's ancient trees and plants, including a 800-year-old cedar, over 3,000 plum trees, bamboo forests, and rare azaleas. The works respond to human presence by changing colors and emitting sounds, creating a dialogue between people and nature. Highlights include luminous ovoids in the cedar forest that transmit color changes to tree lights, projections of traditional figures marching alongside visitors in the bamboo grove, and a video projection inside a fallen tree trunk from a 1964 typhoon showing seasonal flowers blooming and fading in one hour. The final installation uses spatial calligraphy to project an Enso Zen circle over a spring. The exhibition runs until March 31, 2022, demonstrating art can be created without harming the environment, with the cyclical nature of time as a central theme.