In its second issue Pop Mart’s youth-culture magazine play/GROUND takes a deep dive into a topic that defines an entire generation: Future. The world is spinning way too fast for anyone to keep up. The rules keep changing mid-game. And the list of global headaches — climate, war, burnout — just keeps getting longer. For a lot of young people today, the future feels less like a promise and more like one giant question mark. But “the future” isn’t a fixed place. It's only a mental tool we use to make sense of our current anxieties and desires. Every utopia or apocalypse we dream up is just a mirror for whatever mess we’re standing in right now. So play/GROUND Issue No.2 isn’t about making predictions. It’s about the people who use "the future" to tell us something urgent about the present. Cover star Michelle Yeoh, whose life has been one constant leap of faith; Kasing Lung and his iconic character LABUBU, which defined all of 2025; Mariko Mori with her sci-fi visions that question gender roles in Japan; Cao Fei’s Oz avatar embodying a shift in how we live with technology. Designers like Xander Zhou and Windowsen, pushing “futuristic” fashion to ask raw questions about identity and being human. And young voices like Maggie Menghan Chen and Han Gao, whose process, despite their progressive aesthetics, is rooted stubbornly in the now.
