Floating World: A.A.Murakami at MFAH

A series of four sensory landscapes will unfold across the galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, immersing visitors in environments of light, fog, plasma and sound. Opening May 4 and running through Sept. 21, Floating World: A.A.Murakami, a project by the acclaimed Tokyo-and London-based artist duo A.A.Murakami, melds science, art and nature to create unique environments. The project is the duo’s first solo presentation in a U.S. museum and their largest to date anywhere. 

Entering the galleries, visitors will experience Cell (2020), a series of futuristic sculptures made of polished steel and foamed aluminum, an industrial material used in aerospace and construction. A.A.Murakami have instead created porous, cragged forms that reference the East Asian tradition of Scholar’s Rocks and Zen Rock gardens, while also evoking the origins of human life on the ocean floor.

Within the same gallery, the second installation, Neon Sun (2020), employs a series of custom-made glass tubes, each filled with invisible noble gases. Using wireless technology, an electromagnetic field is generated within each vacuum-sealed tube, resulting in a beautiful, otherworldly glow that oscillates between soft green-blues and vivid orange-reds. This wireless visible light replicates in miniature inside each tube the exact same process that results in the glowing plasma streaks of the Aurora Borealis, the Great Northern Lights. Neon Sun expresses the wonder and awe of our life-giving sun and unknowable cosmos, as well as their uncontrollable and constantly changing nature.

Next is Beyond the Horizon (2024), an immersive that was commissioned by M+ in Hong Kong and most recently on display there. Here, clouds give rise to immense, amorphous bubbles that float gracefully through the air, their surfaces catching the light until bursting to return to soft, ephemeral clouds. The bubbles emerge in unpredictable sequences, creating an ever-changing choreography of movement.

From this space visitors will pass into an installation titled Passage (2023). Wisps of fog rings will be launched into the gallery from 18 fog cannons mounted on a large scaffold tower, creating a fully immersive environment.

Visitors will conclude their journey with Under a Flowing Field (2023), an installation that features a network of glass tubes filled with krypton gas, which creates a visually striking field of lightning-like white lines that appear to flow through a void of color-tinted space. The lines appear and disappear in patterns that pulse and move through the space in sequences that start out as random, like falling rain, and gradually form synchronized emergent patterns. The glass tubes resonate, producing a subtle sound that the artists describe as “uncannily like crickets in Autumn grass.”

The work of A.A.Murakami has been presented internationally since the studio’s founding, in 2020, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and M+ in Hong Kong.