The Blockbuster Avant-Garde

Visitors to teamLab Planets, an art venue in Tokyo run by the eponymous art collective, can wade in a knee-deep pool of water, where images of koi fish projected onto the water’s surface dart around their legs, leaving trails of multicolored light in their wakes. Reach down to cup a koi, and it bursts into flowers—cherry blossoms in the spring, sunflowers in the summer—that scatter in the pool. The artwork, as teamLab understands it, is not the structure of the pool or the proj