Wave

What happens when a city immerses itself together in a wave?

WAVE: Hands, Feet, and Tales of Motion is a socially engaged public artwork proposed for the heart of Ho Chi Minh City and presented by the social enterprise Ngày Xưa ASIA. Over one month, artists, architects and local residents build a 12 m long, 3 m high earthen wall shaped like a wave — turning a public space on the Bach Dang riverfront into a collective artwork.

The wave is a fusion of form and metaphor: it evokes footsteps hitting the ground, the flow of people through urban streets and the ever-changing rhythm of public life. In Vietnamese culture, water stands for life, resilience and transformation — the wave, shaped by countless hands, becomes a living symbol: gentle yet powerful, communal yet fragile.

The structure consists of 27 independent, movable pillars: straw cores compressed in plywood moulds, encased by hand in thick layers of locally sourced clay and finished with chalk–casein and silicate paint. Clay and straw — low-impact, renewable and present across many civilisations — quietly challenge the extractive logic of globalised construction while celebrating local knowledge.

Once the wall has dried, Vietnamese lacquer artists and Yannick Portmann paint a utopian vision of Ho Chi Minh City onto it, merging Vietnamese legends, symbols and lacquer art with a paint-by-numbers approach. The community then returns to paint it together — each brushstroke contributing to a shared vision of the city’s future.