Last year, Takashi Murakami jumped on the NFT bandwagon and created a series of small three-dimensional avatars that bore his distinctive motifs. Murakami also made digital flowers, their pixelated aesthetic characteristic of video games from the 1980s. This year, the Japanese artist has created paintings and sculptures that balance between the physical and digital realms. “Japanese culture originally came from the Eurasian continent,” Murakami explains, “and my concept has been to go beyond from there into the metaverse, shooting through the history of art with a single arrow.” These NFT paintings fill two galleries on Madison Avenue. —Elena Clavarino