Taca Sui, "Stele by Zheng Jixuan," 2015

Based in New York and Beijing, fine art photographer Taca Sui uses his camera to carefully conjure the past within a fleeting present. Seeking locations that resonate in Chinese history, he travels throughout the country documenting sites that allow him to trace the ancient past through geologic time.

In a body of work collectively titled "Steles" (2015), fine art photographer Taca Sui focuses on the stone steles that have played a crucial role in the documentation of the history of China. The series was inspired by the Qing-dynasty bureaucrat Huang Yi (1744-1802) who recorded the histories carved into the stone steles of Shandong and Henan province through rubbings, paintings, and diaristic writings. Like Huang Yi 200 years before him, Taca embarked on expeditions to locate traces of the past as preserved in those historic steles.

Now heavily eroded by the elements, each stele stands in its remote surroundings as disappearing monuments of China's cultural past. By capturing the evocative details of these inscrutable landscapes with visual precision, Taca Sui isolates each historic setting from linear time and geographic context and presents them instead as liminal spaces between China's past and present.

Archival pigment print on baryta paper. Unframed. Mounted on wood board.