“Our art director, Linka Guo, brought her graphic novel-inspired style, and later we were joined by Doma Wang as associate art director and environment lead. Together we built Las Nieves, a multicultural city under a dystopian world. Through its environment design, you can see the impact of overpopulation and the widening gap between rich and poor. Doma was deeply inspired by post-war Japanese “metabolic architecture,” which fused architectural megastructures with ideas of organic growth. We incorporated those ideas into the city—stacked air conditioner units, fences to deter thieves, weathered walls, and water stains along concrete edges. These details gave Las Nieves its lived-in, fragile identity.

Helmets were also a central part of the design. In my early storyboards I used motorcycle helmets as placeholders, but eventually we redesigned them into practical, story-driven objects. The idea of these helmets started back in 2020, when I created the concept of the “Anonymous helmet,” long before Tall Wall existed. In Asia, masks had been part of daily life long before COVID—used not only for health, but also as a quiet form of protection and social distance. I saw parallels between this and the anonymous culture of the internet, where my generation grew up shielded behind screens and carried that sensitivity into real life. The helmet in Tall Wall represents this shift: a future where people wear helmets both for hygiene and for anonymity. At the same time, every helmet carries an identification chip linked to a personal ID, showing how anonymity and surveillance exist side by side.”