A.A.Murakami, Beyond the Horizon, commissioned by and exhibited at M+, Hong Kong, 2024, interactive installation. © A.A.Murakami / Film and photography by Adam Kovář and PETR&Co., model by Ashley Lin / Image courtesy of the artist
Floating World: A.A.Murakami
Through September 21, 2025
Members Event: Art-Making Activity for Families, Saturday, May 31 from 2-5pm
After Hours Viewing: Art Crowd, Saturday, June 21 from 6:30-8:30pm
Concert: Thursday, June 26 from 6:30-7:30pm
Audrey Jones Beck Building, 5601 Main Street
We are pleased to present our annual Summer Immersive, Floating World: A.A.Murakami, a project by the acclaimed Tokyo- and London-based artist duo A.A.Murakami. Melding science, art and nature to create unique environments, a series of four sensory landscapes will unfold across the galleries of the MFAH, immersing visitors in environments of light, fog, plasma and sound. This exhibition, the first U.S. museum show from the artist duo, opens May 4 and will be on view through September 21.
Visitors to this immersive exhibition will encounter immense bubble-like clouds that gracefully float and dissolve into mist; swirling fog rings that radiate from a central tower; and dozens of plasma krypton “lightning” tubes that flicker and click while evoking a field of crickets. A groundbreaking fusion of the technical and the natural, Floating World transports you to an ethereal world of singular experience and scientific spectacle.
Established in 2020 by artists Alexander Groves (born 1983) and Azusa Murakami (born 1984), the A.A.Murakami studio constructs immersive installations that fuse science and art. For the MFAH, the studio introduces distinct spaces that emphasize a creative connection to nature. Marvel at amorphous bubbles and interact with rings of fog as you travel through the environment surrounded by glowing lights.
Floating World comprises five intertwined works that feed seamlessly into each other: Cell, a garden of aluminum forms akin to the volcanic rocks at the bottom of the sea; Neon Sun, which mimics the Northern Lights through an incredible array of plasma tubes; Beyond the Horizon, an ethereal experience that challenges perceptions of reality and technology; Passage, a new installation created specifically for the MFAH; and the hypnotic lightning patterns of Under a Flowing Field.
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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Ramayana Textile [detail], Coromandel Coast, India, for the Indonesian market, 18th century, cotton, hand-drawn and mordantdyed, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Banoo and Jeevak Parpia Collection, museum purchase funded by the Alfred C. Glassell Jr. Accessions Endowment
From India to the World: Textiles from the Parpia Collection
June 22 – September 14, 2025
Tour & Toast: Thursdays, August 7 & 21 from 6:15-7:15pm
Audrey Jones Beck Building, 5601 Main Street
We are pleased to feature 67 pieces from a significant group of 187 superb Indian textiles that the museum has recently acquired from the collection of Ithaca, New York-based Banoo and Jeevak Parpia. The Parpias have, over more than 40 years, assembled one of the most significant holdings of Indian textiles in private hands outside of India.
From India to the World: Textiles from the Parpia Collection celebrates this major acquisition by highlighting a new selection from the collection, of textiles that were produced between the 17th and the early 20th century. This exhibition highlights the distinctions between fabrics made for the India market and those produced for export to Southeast Asia and to Europe. The exhibition is curated by Rosemary Crill, former senior curator at the V&A, London, and Amy Poster, consulting curator, MFAH and will be on view June 22 through September 14, 2025.
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Anicka Yi, Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up, The Light Of The Moon (installation view), 2025, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul. © 2025 Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Leeum Museum of Art. Photography by Andrea Rossetti
Anicka Yi: Karmic Debt
June 29 – September 7, 2025
Members Preview: Friday June 27 from 11am-9pm & Saturday, June 28 from 11am-6pm
Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street
From animatronic sculptures that breathe and flicker like prehistoric lifeforms to generative software designed to carry on her practice after death, Anicka Yi approaches technology not as an instrument of control, but as a creative partner. Anicka Yi: Karmic Debt brings to Houston two complementary installations: a suite of five of her Radiolaria sculptures and the immersive video Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up the Light Of the Moon, recently acquired by the MFAH. Both installations dissolve boundaries between biology and technology, proposing new ways of thinking about perception, sentience, and survival across human and nonhuman realms, asking us to reimagine how life—and art—might evolve, mutate, and persist. The exhibition will be on view at the MFAH June 29-September 7, 2025, in the museum’s Cullinan Hall.
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