The Image Burns, Distorts, and Sublimates into Light | teamLab

Name: The Image Burns, Distorts, and Sublimates into Light
Start: 2026-09-02
End: 1970-01-01
Location: UESHIMA MUSEUM

Obras

Matter is Void - Fire

Anyone can download and own the authentic workDownload the Artwork
NFT owners can modify the words of the workModify the Words
Purchase on Pace Verso*From October 20, 2022 17:00 EST

Through the artwork, Matter is Void, teamLab explores the notion of ownership.

This is an NFT artwork. There is only one NFT of this work, but it does not make it exclusive. Anyone and any number of people can download and own the artwork itself. In other words, whether or not someone owns the NFT of the work, the downloaded artworks cannot be distinguished from each other and they are all authentic.
The artwork displays the words chosen by teamLab, “Matter is Void”. Only the NFT owner can modify these words, and those same words will be reflected in all of the artworks downloaded by people around the world.
Depending on the words chosen by the owner of the NFT, the value of the artwork will change. If the words rewritten by the owner of the NFT possess value, more people may choose to own the artwork; and if the words do not possess value, people may no longer choose to display the work. There may be great value in rewriting the words of an artwork that many people look at, and conversely little value in rewriting the words of an artwork that is not displayed anywhere. Depending on the words chosen by the owner of the NFT, the value of the NFT will also likely change.
Once the original words are modified, even if the owner of the NFT decides to change them back to “Matter is Void”, the words will appear differently from the original; the initial “Matter is Void”, once modified, will not be able to be seen in its original state ever again.

The letters of the words in this artwork continuously revolve and rotate. Depending on the angle we may be able to recognize the letters as they continue to rotate, and there will be moments when we can recognize the meaning of the letters as a whole, but once again, they will become indiscernible and the words lose meaning. The way in which the words revolve is visually perceived as moving simultaneously clockwise and counterclockwise, and depending on which movement is consciously followed, the words can appear to be moving in either direction.

Sobre teamLab

teamLab (f. 2001) is an international art collective that seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. Through art, the interdisciplinary group of specialists, including artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects, aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world, and new forms of perception.

In order to understand the world around them, people separate it into independent entities with perceived boundaries between them. teamLab seeks to transcend these boundaries in our perceptions of the world, of the relationship between the self and the world, and of the continuity of time. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity.

teamLab’s works are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;  Amos Rex, Helsinki; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul; and Asia Society Museum, New York, among others.

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Biographical Documents

About the Exhibition

Curator：Yuko Hasegawa
This exhibition renews the majority of the collection on display. Rooted in "contemporaneity," previous exhibitions have brought works into dialogue through paired forces — the heat of the city and the gravity of matter, or color and narrative. This time, the exhibition reimagines the visitor's physical ascent from the basement to the top floor as a narrative of transformation in the act of seeing itself. Beginning with the emotionally charged scenes of large-scale paintings, the exhibition moves through the pop, glitch-inflected energy of the city, the forms of the world that emerge through the human figure, and finally arrives at abstract light itself, detached from image. With each floor climbed, the image gradually lets go of its own outline.