W(rit)ing is a series of false-infrared aerial images that make the earth look like a sheet of paper. From above, landscapes start to resemble ink splashes, scribbles, cross-hatching, and casual marks—like someone doodled directly onto the ground.
Using false infrared shifts the colors away from what we expect. Plants glow, shadows lose depth, and familiar terrain becomes graphic and flat. The images stop feeling like photos of places and start feeling like drawings. Roads turn into lines, fields into textures, and erosion into smudges or erasures.
The title plays on the idea that writing is a kind of marking. To write is to leave a trace, and many of the marks visible from the air come from human activity—farming, building, digging, dividing land. These actions aren’t meant as art, but seen at scale they form patterns that feel intentional, repetitive, and sometimes careless. There’s no single author here. The marks are made by people, machines, weather, and time all working together. What looks playful or abstract at first can also point to wear, pressure, and long-term impact on the land.
W(rit)ing asks viewers to look at the landscape less as scenery and more as a surface that’s constantly being marked. The work sits between drawing and documentation, inviting a slower look at how everyday actions quietly etch their traces on the earth.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 22/07/2022
