teamLab’s immersive, interaction-driven installations have mostly lived in the collective’s own permanent museums in Japan — teamLab Borderless and teamLab Planets in Tokyo chief among them. This year, that changes on two continents at once, at very different scales.
Watch: teamLab Borderless Tokyo — The Ultimate Tour & Review (YouTube)
Chicago: a five-month museum premiere
“teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity” opens September 22, 2026, at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, running through February 21, 2027. It’s billed as a North American premiere rather than a touring version of an existing show. Among the highlighted works is “Massless Suns and Dark Suns” — an installation that fills a darkened room with glowing spheres that appear to float in midair, brightening and triggering reactions throughout the space as visitors move closer. It’s a university museum setting rather than a dedicated teamLab building, which matters for access: expect standard museum hours and likely free or low-cost admission tied to the institution, rather than the ticketed, purpose-built-venue model teamLab uses in Tokyo.
Hamburg: a permanent home, not a temporary show
The bigger structural news is in Germany. The UBS Digital Art Museum opens in Hamburg’s HafenCity district in 2026 as a 6,500-square-meter space — billed as the largest institution in Europe dedicated exclusively to digital and immersive art. It launches with a permanent teamLab Borderless installation spread across the entire building, with artworks described as moving freely between rooms and transforming in response to visitors, consistent with how the Tokyo original operates.
That’s a different commitment than a temporary exhibition: a purpose-built museum whose whole program is anchored around this one collective’s work, in a major European city that hasn’t had anything at this scale before.
Why both openings matter together
A five-month university museum show and a permanent flagship building are different bets on the same underlying idea — that interaction-driven, spatially distributed digital installation work scales from a single gallery room to an entire building. Seeing both launch in the same year, on two continents, is a reasonable signal of how much institutional appetite currently exists for this category of work, beyond the handful of cities that have had access to it until now.