Description
Vietnam has never proclaimed a national flower; yet when the public was consulted, in 2011, the lotus came first. It is everywhere: in Hanoi’s One Pillar Pagoda, raised in 1049 in the shape of a flower rising from the water; in the tea scented on West Lake with the stamens of at least a thousand flowers for a single kilogram; in an anonymous folk song taught at school: “In the pond, what is as beautiful as the lotus? […] So close to the mud, and without the smell of the mud.” The flower that rises from the silt without keeping its trace has become, here as in Buddhism, an image of purity.
You have to rise above the ponds to understand this image. At the ponds of Hang Múa, at the foot of Mount Ngọa Long, at eye level you see only basins covered with leaves and walkways on stilts; from directly above, the path becomes a drawing: the petals of an immense flower, a central form of supple curves, a radiating fan. Black and white strips the old song of its colours — green leaves, white flowers, yellow stamens — and keeps only the structure: the geometry of the dykes, the pale line of the walkways, the dense grain of the leaves on the water. What remains is an almost calligraphic figure, in which people have traced the emblem upon its very model.
The Water series follows places where water does more than carry the landscape; here, it carries a symbol.
