The Shiseido Gallery is pleased to announce our exhibition of photographer Tsuda Nao, SMOKE LINE—TRACING THE WINDSTREAMS. This is a solo exhibition of Tsuda Nao, recently in the spotlight for his groundbreaking work in cutting through the expressive currents and tendencies of landscape photography, and will show his newest work which he created during his travels through China, Mongolia, and Morocco. Tsuda Nao (1976–) completed a post-graduate cours at Osaka University of Arts, and since 2001 he has worked primarily in Osaka and Tokyo. Recently he has been expanding his work to the larger world stage, including an exhibition in New York this year and plans to exhibit at Paris Photo 2008 in November. Tsuda's approach is to travel to different parts of the world and merge himself into the landscapes he encounters to gain unique perspectives that capture enigmatic elements not usually experienceable through photography, for example the relationship and continuity between the overarching expansiveness of the surrounding landscape and the great flow of time. The scenes captured through Tsuda's eye are marked by a certain profundity along with a transparent sense of airiness and pervasive silence, but at the same time they possess a sharpness and power that pull the viewer into their depths.

SMOKE LINE—TRACING THE WINDSTREAMS features works Tsuda created during his travels through China, Mongolia, and Morocco over a three-year period, is going to be shown on a scale befitting the space of the Shiseido Gallery. “Wind” is the focus of the photographer's explorations throughout these new works. Having no beginning and no end, never stopping to remain in any realm and constantly on the move, wind is expressed as a forceful presence running like a belt tying together all the disparate elements of the world. By looking at the wind itself (without recourse to its more visible effects on swaying trees and the like), Tsuda challenges himself to express, in photographs, something of the universality of the world's structure. Led by the wind, Tsuda traveled to China, Mongolia, and Morocco, spending time in each region with nomadic tribespeople and others with particularly strong connections to the wind, making photographs as he went. In the larger room of the gallery we show mingle images of different types of scenery taken in these three different regions—deserts, lakes, ridgelines, rivers, seas of clouds and fog, rooftops, and others—and as an aggregate these build a kind of picture scroll through which one is made to feel the limitless expansiveness of space and time. On the scale of the natural world, these regions, so disparate at first glance, prove to be linked and sustained and unified by that transparent belt-like presence that Tsuda calls the “SMOKE LINE.”

In the smaller room of the gallery, the photographer turns to illuminate the existence of more concrete “individualities,” that is to say those solid objects he has discovered through spending time with people encountered along his wind-guided travels. These works intermingle photos and poetry, expressing human activities and occupations at the family and village level. They include the first images of “people” that Tsuda Nao has ever presented, and they also take up the challenge of the new expressive method of finishing photographs with letterpress typography. Through the displays in these two rooms large and small Tsuda offers a perspective on the relationships between the dynamism of the overarching larger world and the activity of the people living within it. The Shiseido Gallery invites you to share the new realms discovered in the unique photographic discourses Tsuda Nao has created in turning to face these landscapes and their thousands-of-years scale. * The text above provided by Shiseido Gallery.