Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on March 7 of Odes by Taca Sui. Odes is the culmination of a three-year project which was previewed in May - June, 2012 when Taca participated in a two-person exhibition with Cui Fei Origins at Chambers Fine Art, New York. Now that the project is complete the current exhibition represents a more comprehensive survey from the entire body of work.
Born in Tsingtao, China in 1984, Taca currently divides his time between Beijing and New York. Since 2010 he has been working on a project inspired by the Book of Odes (Shi jing), the celebrated collection of poems which dates from the Bronze Age. To prepare for a photographic series based on the Book of Odes, he first spent a year immersed in the classic text and its enormous body of commentary. He worked out an itinerary based on places named in the text, visited them one after another--but without seeking to document the poems’ original setting, to illustrate their imagery, or to add another set of footnotes to the three thousand years’ worth of ingenuity and guesswork already on the shelves. Rather, in visiting the sites, Taca laid himself open to the discovery-procedure already implicit in the poems, and reproduced, not their particulars but their method.
The photographs in this collection don’t illustrate the Book of Odes, they evoke its workings in a different medium. Recognizing the elusiveness of the topic, Taca has stated that he hopes “to build a stable artistic structure that corresponds on some level to the composition of the Book of Odes, but at the same time pushes the Odes’ literary significance into a distant and unfamiliar world, bringing the work’s amorphous and mystical concepts into reality and by doing so, facilitates analysis of the Odes which truly is an artistic model with limitless possibility.”
In total there are now nine groups of photographs – Odes of Ya and Song, Odes of Zhou Nan and Shao Nan, Odes of Wei, Odes of Wang, Odes of Zheng and Kuai, Odes of Tang and Wei, Odes of Qi and Cao, Odes of Qin and Bin and Odes of Chen - from which a selection will be shown in New York. In subject matter they range from mountain ranges and rivers to close-ups of unexpected details but they are all unified by Taca’s masterly control of the platinum and silver gelatin process through which he achieves tonal effects of extraordinary refinement.
The formal austerity and timeless subject matter of Taca Sui’s work sets him apart from the great majority of his contemporaries, relating him to the earlier masters of the medium rather than to current practitioners of manipulated photography.
北京前波画廊荣幸地宣布将于2013年3月7日起举办塔可的个展《诗山河考》。2012年5月至6月，纽约的前波画廊举办了塔可和崔斐的双人展《起源》，其中展出了《诗山河考》这一系列的部分摄影作品。本次展览将首次完整展现《诗山河考》的全部作品。
塔可1984年在青岛出生，目前往返于北京和纽约两地生活和工作。他深受源自青铜器时期的诗集《诗经》的启发，自2010年起开始创作《诗山河考》这一摄影系列。为了筹备这个创作项目，塔可首先花了一年时间钻研《诗经》的文字以及大量的研究资料。他根据《诗经》中提到的地名作了一个路线计划，一个接一个地亲身造访了这些地点。但他没有刻意去记录诗歌原本的情境或阐释它们的意象，或步众多文人学者的后尘在三千年来对《诗经》的研究上添加更多的揣摩。造访这些地点时，塔可毫无拘束地运用了《诗经》的创作手法，而他模仿的不是这一诗集的具体内容而是其表现方式。
《诗山河考》中的摄影作品并没有试图阐释《诗经》，而是通过另一种媒介来呼应《诗经》的创作手法。关于这一深奥的主题，塔可说道：“我希望建构一种稳定而又牢固的结构，同时与‘诗’本身的结构在某些层面可以形成互文，把文学性的意义推到一个遥远而又陌生的世界。使这些无形而神秘的东西进入现实之中，来剖析这个负载著无数可能性的范本。”
《诗山河考》中的九组摄影作品《雅•颂》、《周南•召南》、《卫风》、《王风》、《郑风•桧风》、《唐风•魏风》、《齐风•曹风》、《秦风•豳风》以及《陈风》将首次同时展出。它们以严谨的构图和简练的形式引人注目。从无际的山川河流到意想不到的细节特写，这些作品题材各异。然而，塔可对铂盐及银盐印相的精湛运用将它们有机地结合，其对色调的掌控也不得不令人叹为观止。