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.
