ArtScience Museum tickets: teamLab Future World and what else is on

The ArtScience Museum opened on 17 February 2011 as part of Marina Bay Sands and is the largest private museum in Singapore. Moshe Safdie designed it as ten curved "fingers" around a round base — a shape usually described as a lotus, and once described by the resort's own chairman as "the welcoming hand of Singapore". Each finger holds a gallery with a skylight at the tip, and the roof funnels rainwater through the centre of the building into a pool inside.

Twenty-one gallery spaces across about 6,000 square metres. What is in them changes several times a year, which is the single most important thing to know before you buy a ticket.

The programme decides what your ticket is worth

Unlike a permanent-collection museum, most of what the ArtScience Museum shows is on loan and on rotation. A ticket in March and a ticket in September buy different experiences.

The one fixed point is teamLab Future World, the permanent digital installation created with the Japanese collective teamLab. It is the reason most families come and the reason the museum shows up in so many Singapore photo sets.

Everything else — the large touring exhibitions, the VR Gallery, the ArtScience Cinema and Laboratory programmes — cycles. Check what is currently showing on the operator's site before you choose a tier. Buying a multi-exhibition ticket for a touring show you do not care about is the most common way to overpay here.

What Future World actually is

It is not a gallery of screens. It is a sequence of rooms that respond to you.

• Sketch Aquarium — you colour a fish on paper, it is scanned, and it swims into a wall-sized projected sea. Small children will not leave this room voluntarily.
• Crystal Universe — a walk-in field of suspended LED points that shifts pattern around visitors.
• Sliding through the Fruit Field — a physical slide projected as a landscape that reacts as you descend.
• Aerial Climbing through a Flock of Coloured Birds — a climbing structure, which is exactly as physical as it sounds.
• A Table Where Little People Live, A Musical Wall Where Little People Live — projection works on furniture that children interact with by touch.

Allow ninety minutes. Wear something you can climb and slide in, and expect the rooms to be loud with children on a weekend.

teamLab occasionally closes sections while new work is installed. That is worth checking on the day, because it changes how much of the ticket you actually get.

Timing is everything

Arrive at 10am when the doors open. Future World is a series of small dark rooms and it is transformed by not being full. The first hour is quiet; from noon onwards Marina Bay Sands feeds a steady walk-up crowd into the building.

After 5pm is the second-quiet window, with last entry at 6pm and closing at 7pm. That is enough for Future World but tight for a multi-exhibition ticket.

Rain is the variable. When a tropical downpour hits Marina Bay, the ArtScience Museum and the Shoppes are where everyone goes. If your day is wet, go early rather than waiting it out.

For photographs, the exterior at blue hour — roughly 7.10pm to 7.35pm — with the reflecting pool in the frame is the shot, and it needs no ticket at all. Inside, Crystal Universe is the room people photograph, and it works best when there are fewer bodies blocking the light points, which takes you back to arriving at 10am.

The insider entry

The museum has its own entrance at the waterfront end of the Marina Bay Sands complex, but many visitors arrive through the Bayfront MRT exit and end up walking the length of The Shoppes to reach it.

Coming from Bayfront MRT, take the exit towards the Event Plaza and the waterfront promenade rather than into the mall. You surface at the water, walk past the reflecting pool, and reach the museum entrance directly. It is shorter, and it puts you at the best exterior photo angle on the way in.

Coming from the Helix Bridge on foot, the museum is the first Marina Bay Sands building you reach — you do not need to enter the resort at all.

How to save

Buy the tier that matches what is showing. Single exhibition, Future World, or multi. Most visitors want Future World and nothing else, and paying for a multi-exhibition ticket "just in case" is money spent on rooms you will walk through in four minutes.

Do not buy this and the SkyPark deck as a pair on a tight budget. They are on the same site, both charge, and neither improves the other. If you have one budget, the deck at dusk and the museum's exterior for free is the better version of that evening.

Check the operator's site for resident promotions. Marina Bay Sands runs local rates and member pricing that do not appear on reseller listings.

The exterior and the reflecting pool are free. So is the waterfront promenade around it, and so is Spectra at the Event Plaza next door every evening. A visit to Marina Bay that skips every paid attraction is still a good evening.

How to get there

Bayfront MRT (CE1 on the Circle Line, DT16 on the Downtown Line), then the exit towards the Event Plaza and the promenade — about five minutes on foot.

On foot from the Singapore Flyer it is fifteen minutes across the Helix Bridge, and the museum is the first building you meet. From Gardens by the Bay it is about fifteen minutes through The Shoppes and out the other side.

The address is 6 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018974.

What is nearby

Everything at Marina Bay. The SkyPark Observation Deck is in Hotel Tower 3 on the same site, Gardens by the Bay is a ten-minute walk with Garden Rhapsody free at 7.45pm, and Spectra runs nightly and free at the Event Plaza directly outside the museum.

For a second museum rather than a second view, National Gallery Singapore is about twenty minutes' walk or two MRT stops away, and it is the traditional-art counterweight to this building's digital one.