Predicament

I have spent time “discovering” the natural Australian landscape which has continually fascinated me since I began to study photography in 1986. I wanted to investigate my new surroundings and the emotions that were created inside me after fleeing my home in Vietnam. In these photographic images, I have attempted to address the notion of disparity between the Eastern tradition of representation and that of the West.

The depiction of the environment alters from culture to culture. Eastern landscape traditions tend to elongate, flatten and distort our visual reality. The image is read vertically from top to bottom. In the Western traditional landscape, photography images tend to dictate a horizontal reading, which relies on a single point perspective, modeled forms an unusually well-defined tonal contrast. This tradition, typical of American landscape photography of this century, aims to create an accurate and often surreal document, without pretense and manipulation by an identifiable or interfering hand.

By merging Western theory and technology with Western philosophy, I have appropriated American landscape photographer Ansel Adam’s sense of detail and tone, combining this (by surface drawing, differing gestural marks, and characters) with the traditional softness and spirituality of Chinese ink paintings.

© Dacchi Dang, 1993 All rights reserved