Description
This drone image flies over the wetland plain of Thua Thien, in central Vietnam, where water is the true substance of the landscape. Narrow dykes divide the expanse into polygons — trapezoids, triangles, long strips — no one of which resembles its neighbour, and the eye moves through this network as through the leading of a stained-glass window. Black and white unifies everything: the surfaces of water take on barely distinguishable values of grey, modulated by the wind and the beds beneath, and only a few minute signs — a boat, a hut, rows of poles — recall the true scale and the presence of people. No vanishing point, no open horizon: the pattern fills the entire frame and tips over into abstraction. Yet it is a profoundly worked landscape, shaped plot by plot, where every visible line is the result of an agricultural gesture repeated for generations.
