Tragically, Grass Wonder, one of the horses an Uma Musume was based on, passed away on 8th August 2025. Following his passing, I saw a peculiar call on Twitter for people to ‘help finish’ a tribute artwork to him in the Philippines. Upon encountering the tweet, I was confused. Help finish an artwork in the Phillippines? What could that mean?
The Grass Wonder tribute piece when we visited it on Stream
It didn’t take much looking about to discover there existed a now-popular platform called wplace, where anyone could colour pixels on the world map at continuous intervals (1 pixel every 30 seconds), with levelling up and painting on the canvas providing a currency known as ‘droplets’, allowing you to upgrade your tools, pixel-painting capacity, and unlock extra colours. You can even create alliances to work with others more easily!
The idea is simple and ingenious. Incorporating the world map as a canvas provided not only a massive space for collaborative art (some 3 TRILLION pixels) but encourages intentionality in where one places their work.
Working on an artpiece with others also sparks our innate desires for a sense of belonging and contribution to a greater cause, which to me, is what keeps users coming back to the canvas.
Furthermore, every pixel’s latest painter is attributed. Clicking on any pixel lets one know which user left it there, when, and what time. It gives significance to a simple action, and even I, during the first half of our stream, found myself inclined to help others fill in their works in progress as we traversed the vast lands and seas.
We saw lots of locally-flavoured art in Singapore, with symbols and images (and selfies???) familiar to Singaporeans. Heading to Tokyo, the artwork was insanely dense, with pieces from popular Japanese media painstakingly plastered around the map. All around the world, pictures of pixel characters were dominant. Characters from Undertale, Deltarune, Pokemon, OMORI, and Tamagotchi were common, since pixel sprites were easily available to use as a reference.
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I have no idea how the bigger pieces were translated into pixel form, but from what I am aware there is no way to import a photo, so whether it’s putting an image through a pixelating filter and transferring the work pixel by pixel onto the canvas, or free-hand interpreting how to represent the image of your choice, it is a tedious process which takes many human clicks (AND TIME!) to put together. This is what I think is the most beautiful part of wplace — that every pixel is human made. In the age of AIgen, it is always refreshing to see things made by the human hand.
In the case of Grass Wonder’s tribute mural, it was discovered that the base image used for the mural was an AI generated image, which sparked controversy and attracted vandals to the piece during its progress. In a space where everyone has the ability and free will to draw whatever one wants, this unfortunately doesn’t surprise anybody. |
In addition to griefing and defacing, there also began a practice that some users of wplace would engage in — voiding.
This practice upset many artists and users online, who (understandably) felt that the void was doing nothing but covering up the map in ugly colours, deterring others from drawing in them and finding other areas to draw on instead. Voids would pop up anywhere, and in more populated places, users would ‘go to war’ with voiders to rescue their homelands from being covered up.
I can’t speak on behalf of the voiders because I don’t appreciate this practice. But to know what goes on in the minds of those who engage in activities like these would be interesting.
During the 2nd half of our community wplace stream, we populated the Bunny Island of Ōkunoshima in Takehara, Japan with some Himes and Henchbunnies! (Base pixel art by usa_lip on Skeb) As expected upon landing in the zone, we found it already decorated with pixel art of bunnies and bunnygirls!
This phonomenon can be found everywhere, with islands like egg island being populated with eggs, or Pulau Tekong (Singapore’s army training camp location) themed with army-related images. It was fun to contribute to the world’s canvas in our own way, and it makes me wonder if the canvas will ever be fully filled in the end.
I am so curious to see how wplace will evolve as a medium, and whether other peculiar human behaviours will surface alongside it. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the beauty of transient art in pixel form through this platform. Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the simple pixel art we did! (And for expanding the army even more post-stream XD) More henchbunnies in mysterious places have been popping up! I love to see it.
The henchbunnies below courtesy of theofromyt. Check out our wplace stream VOD here!