Dedicated to contemporary art and digital innovations, Phillips is proud to offer a digital artwork by teamLab for the first time to the international auction market. Universe of Water Particles will be offered in our 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale in Hong Kong on 26 November.
teamLab is a Tokyo-based interdisciplinary art collective whose practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, technology, design and the natural world. Rooted in the traditions of Japanese art, teamLab's works explore human behavior in the information era and proposes innovative models for societal development.
This sensational and breath-taking installation continues the East Asian scholarly tradition of lanscape painting, transorming this ancient and revered subject into a contemporary narrative using modern-day techonology. - Jonathan Crockett, Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
Exhibited widely around the globe, Universe of Water Particles depicts an ever-evolving, virtual waterfall in an immersive, three-dimensional virtual space. The materiality of water is expressed as a continuum of water droplets that flow and fall in accordance with computer-calculated movement, and the sinuous lines of the waterfall form their virtual trajectories based on the interaction between the water particles. Universe of Water Particles is one of the best representations of the group's concept of ultrasubjective space, a term that refers to a distinct form of spatial depiction in pre-modern Japanese painting, in which oceans, rivers and other bodies of water were expressed as series of curvilinear lines to convey movement and simulate life. By distorting objective space and time, Universe of Water Particles leads viewers to explore how pre-modern people perceived nature in art, in a new, subjective experience of the natural world founded on the technology of today.
Contemporary Specialist and Head of Sale, Sandy Ma, explores how the work is influenced by traditional Japanese art, Shintoism and Zen Buddhism.
20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design will be on view at the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong 23-26 November in advance of the 26 November Evening Sale.