Superblue, the Miami-based experiential art company behind a growing roster of large-scale immersive installations, will open its first venue outside the United States in Kyoto, Japan, in early 2027 — and it’s doing it directly across the street from one of the biggest names in the same space.
Two very different approaches to immersive art, facing each other
Superblue Kyoto sits in the Kyoto Station Southeast Area, directly opposite teamLab Biovortex Kyoto, which opened as teamLab’s largest museum in the country in October 2025. The two buildings share a distinctive indigo-blue exterior and will face one another across the street — a pairing that puts Superblue’s curated, artist-driven model of experiential art right next to teamLab’s collective-built, technology-first immersive environments, in the same small footprint.
The placement isn’t incidental. It’s part of a City of Kyoto revitalization initiative aimed at establishing cultural and creative hubs in the area, with an explicit emphasis on art, culture, and reaching younger generations — a city known globally for historic temples and traditional arts deliberately building a contemporary, technology-adjacent art district next to its train station.
Turrell gets one of his largest shows in Japan
Superblue Kyoto’s inaugural exhibition is dedicated to James Turrell, tracing his roughly six-decade exploration of light and space in what the venue describes as one of his largest solo exhibitions ever mounted in Japan. Turrell has treated light as his primary material since the 1960s — manipulating color, depth, and spatial perception until light itself starts to feel like a physical, almost tangible object, destabilizing a viewer’s read of the room they’re standing in. His 1966 piece Afrum-Proto, one of his earliest experiments in the form, used a projected light source to make a floating cube appear to occupy real, three-dimensional space in the corner of an otherwise empty room.
Superblue, founded in 2020, has built its model around exactly this kind of work: large-scale experiential art that places the visitor physically inside the piece rather than in front of it. Its first permanent venue opened in Miami in 2021 with installations by artists including Es Devlin, teamLab, and Turrell himself — making the Kyoto venue, in part, an expansion of a working relationship rather than a first-time commission.
Why Kyoto, and why now
For a city whose cultural identity runs through its temples and historic architecture, pairing Superblue and teamLab in a single new district creates a concentrated, deliberately contemporary counterpoint — a place where international experiential art, Japanese collective-built immersive work, and the city’s own cultural-development ambitions meet in the same two buildings. The exhibition’s opening date in “early 2027” hasn’t been pinned down further yet, which is typical for a venue still under construction, but the pairing with teamLab’s already-open Biovortex gives Kyoto’s newest art district its anchor tenant on both sides of the street before Superblue’s doors even open.