Team Lab

I saw a show at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea of animations by a group of Japanese digital artists who call themselves "Team Lab".   The animations, on large screens in darkened rooms, were fascinating.  I was especially taken with one installation, with 10 or 12 large screens in a row, all of them animating and riffing on traditional Japanese screen painting.   Each individual screen was worth watching on its own, and the some total was overwhelming.   I had just seen an exhibition of Japanese screen painting at the Met a few days before. You can see the videos on You Tube.

Youtube videos

One of the other videos unfortunately had a terrible sort of Japanese new-ageish musical soundtrack; the others, mercifully, were silent.

Some still pictures:

I really enjoy scroll paintings because they are so wide that one cannot take them all in at once,  Your eye is meant to move and explore.  I also saw at the Met a widescreen video that was wider than anything I have ever seen.  It was commissioned for a show on Chinese calligraphy, and was a black and white continuously changing drawing.   Impossible to reproduce, but here is a snapshot of part of it.