This body of work takes the architectural form of the Hanoi tube house—those narrow, stacked structures shaped by necessity and the compressed tempo of urban life. Recast in soap, a material chosen for its ephemerality and sensuous tactility, each sculpture functions as both monument and memento.

The use of soap—a substance that dissolves, softens, and yields to time—subverts the architectural promise of solidity. Geometry is precise, even formalist, but the medium insists on change. Over days and weeks, each structure begins to lean, blister, and erode. This is not failure, but intent: a slow choreography of collapse that renders disappearance visible.

Duong’s work disengages from the impulse to preserve. The sculptures breathe, sweat, and shrink in response to their environment—ambient heat, moisture, even touch—all agents of transformation. The material becomes a stand-in for memory itself: mutable, tender, always on the verge of vanishing.

These are works that resist stasis. They are not preserved, but performed—acts of dissolution that speak to the transience of place, the porousness of identity, and the cost of progress. In their soft undoing, they ask what kind of city is left when the structures that once held it begin to melt.