1. Tao Siqi — The Naked Eye, Capsule Shanghai
From August 30 to November 1, 2025, Capsule Shanghai mounts The Naked Eye, a solo exhibition of over twenty new oil paintings by Tao Siqi.
Tao’s works explore desire, corporeality, and the liminal spaces between beauty and decay. Her compositions are cropped, intimate, and evocative of psychological tension. Light often functions as a revealing and concealing force, rendering flesh, memory, and fantasy in shifting balance.
This exhibition is Tao’s second solo at Capsule and positions her as one of the more evocative voices among her generation.
2. Shuo Hao — Huile de vitre, Galerie Derouillon, Paris
In Paris, Galerie Derouillon is showing Shuo Hao’s Huile de vitre from September 3 to October 4, 2025.
Shuo Hao’s practice melds painting, assemblage, found furniture, and texts, deploying metaphor, ritual, and transformation as structural principles. She works across mythology, Taoism, Christian iconography, and personal loss, crafting spaces where matter and spirit converse.
In Huile de vitre, objects like tables or cabinets are repurposed as altars or thresholds; each piece corresponds to trigrams from the Yi Jing (Book of Changes). The exhibition is accompanied by a set of fifty short texts (in Mandarin and English) that function as a parallel poetic layer, rather than mere exegesis.
3. Maoya Kishi — Unruly, TATSURO KISHIMOTO, Tokyo
In Tokyo, Maoya Kishi is showing Unruly at Tatsuro Kishimoto gallery from August 23 through September 20, 2025.
Kishi works mainly with everyday and industrial materials (wood, styrofoam, tarps, LED signboards, construction components), but he assembles them with minimal alteration. The faces of these works are neither figurative nor fully abstract—they prompt questions: what does it mean for an object to assert itself as sculpture?
His method involves observing the inherent textures, limits, and affordances of materials, and then recomposing them, often letting “failures” in structure or meaning persist. Tension between order and disorder, control and contingency, is central to his aesthetic.
4. Wan Chaoqian — All Ends Well, Magician Space, Beijing
In Beijing, Wan Chaoqian presents All Ends Well at Magician Space, running through September 13, 2025.
While public texts are more limited for Wan’s show, the title suggests an engagement with resolution, closure, or cycles of transformation. The gallery’s social media confirms images from the installation, giving glimpses of sculptural or spatial interventions.
Given Beijing’s importance as a hub for contemporary Chinese art, this exhibition is well worth attending for those following emerging trajectories in sculpture and installation from Asia.
Why These Shows Matter
Diverse geographies, unified urgency: These four exhibitions span Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo, and Beijing, demonstrating the reach and mobility of Asian contemporary art.
Matter, metaphor, and transformation: Whether through painting, assemblage, industrial detritus, or site-specific work, each artist is probing material thresholds—how bodies, objects, memory, and myth intersect.
New narratives of Asian art: These shows contribute to a shifting map in which Asian artists are not only responding to Western or global art histories, but also synthesizing regional cosmologies, philosophical systems, and personal poetics.
