Takashi Murakami x Virgil Abloh: Glance Past the Future (2018, Mixed Media on Canvas) is a collaboration that fuses Murakami’s signature Superflat aesthetic with Abloh’s conceptual interventions, creating a layered meditation on identity, temporality, and cultural crossover.

The composition presents a distorted portrait, partially obscured by swaths of vivid pink and black, interspersed with Murakami’s iconic cartoon-like motifs—most notably, the bold, circular eyes of his smiling characters. The image oscillates between figuration and abstraction, as the human face dissolves into painterly smears and superimposed graphics.

Murakami’s playful visual language collides with Abloh’s commentary on cultural erasure and fragmentation. The overlay of forms suggests a clash between past and future, tradition and reinvention—echoing the title’s directive to look “past” what is immediately visible. The bold pink gestures introduce a raw, almost violent energy, contrasting with Murakami’s normally pristine surfaces, while Abloh’s presence disrupts the comfort of pop imagery with a sense of urgency and decay.

In Glance Past the Future, the two artists merge worlds: Murakami’s Japanese post-pop universe and Abloh’s global streetwear-meets-conceptual art vocabulary. The result is a hybrid work that resists easy classification, embodying the friction and collaboration at the heart of contemporary culture. It is an artwork about transformation—how identity and meaning shift as we navigate between histories, aesthetics, and futures.