Wallpaper* Thai edition commissioned Rice Creative to create the cover an upcoming issue.  Much of the issue was about Vietnam. The brief asked to create a cover image, which would express modern Vietnam from our perspective. It was a terribly difficult brief to distill a setting which we gain so much inspiration from into a single image. We finally centered our concept around signage. The view from our office in the central business district of Ho Chi Minh City offers a sea of flickering LED and neon signage. Everyone from fruit sellers, to money exchangers to gold and jewelry shops compete with bigger brighter and flashier signs. The old facades of the buildings in the city recede further and further out of sight and with them some of the traditional symbols and patterns that can be found. We wondered if we could flip the situation and see what a bunch of traditional symbols in neon would look like dominating the scene, so we made it. We designed and produced a series of custom neon and LED signs. The collection mixed traditional patterns and symbols, with some of our favorite standard signs found on the streets. We created alternate compositions and commissioned photographer Neil Massey to shoot them for the cover. We hoped that the final image would be a striking cover for Wallpaper*, and raise question as much as express a point of view on our environment.

 

Cover photographer Neil Massey

Making of images by Joshua Breidenabach