Spectacular Exhibition Merges Museum And Sauna For 'Very Different' Digital Art Experience

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) - A Tokyo-based digital art group has taken over an empty lot in the city's glitzy Roppongi district to create an unprecedented exhibition combining the experiences of art and sauna.

"TikTok teamLab Reconnect" is the latest creation of Japan's popular teamLab collective of engineers, artists and architects, anchored around a maze of seven saunas lit up in hues of red, green and yellow.

Over the last year, they erected a mass tent housing the sauna rooms and three immersive art installations, which includes hundreds of butterflies that dart around a screen of tiny water particles, a wall of flower petals that burst into a thousand fragments and a huge pool that turns from red to purple levitating in the air.

Art buffs, health freaks and anybody else can dip in and out of the hot rooms and cold showers and experience the artworks sporting only swimming suits.

"We try to make the visitor be in a very relaxed and luxury mindset, and we use sauna's techniques, like hot [sauna], cold [shower], rest, hot, cold, rest, and that cycles," teamLab member Takashi Kudo tells Reuters.

"And after that, if you see the artworks or if you're one part of the artworks, maybe the experience is going be much richer than normal dimensions or the normal mindset," he adds.

TeamLab hopes to impact all senses of visitors, including touch, sound and smells, such as roasted green tea in one of the saunas or white birch in another.

"Nobody goes to an art museum in this fashion because art is art and sauna is sauna. But what we wanted to try is to combine and try to (offer a) very different experience and a very different experience of this art. That is a unique point," Kudo says.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, seating spaces inside the biggest saunas had to be cut from 24 to 12 and ventilation adjusted to meet government standards for air circulation.

"TikTok teamLab Reconnect" will be open through August 31. Admission is $44 on weekdays and $53 on weekends.