This November, celebrated British artist Anish Kapoor opened a major solo exhibition in Beijing at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Museum and Taimiao Art Museum of the Imperial Ancestral Temple, by the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing. As Kapoor's first solo exhibition in China, the show includes some of the artist's most significant and celebrated works of his last 35 years – with powerful, self-generated installations at the CAFA Art Museum and sensory, geometrical sculptures at the Taimiao Art Museum of Imperial Ancestral Temple.

The exhibition opened at the CAFA on October 25 and will be open at the Taimiao Art Museum of Imperial Ancestral Temple on November 11.

Anish Kapoor's art is often "red," and he has said that red has a certain implicit and active sexuality that fascinated him, and he always wanted to create works in this color. He carries this fascination through in his exhibition in China.  

Kapoor's art has often appealed to Chinese audiences for its great "oriental feeling," said CAFA director Zhang Zikang at an exhibition opening in May. 

The value of thought that India and China share in the historical exchange is fully reflected in Kapoor's artistic concepts and practice, Zhang said, adding that he believed Kapoor's exhibition would be a meaningful reference for understanding how China's rich traditional history can find contemporary expression.

Instead of Kapoor's famous mirror works, a series of stainless steel and pigment sculptures will be exhibited at Taimiao Art Museum of Imperial Ancestral Temple, such as S-Curve (2006) and C-Curve (2007), which morph from concave to convex, bending and twisting their surroundings, turning the world upside down before restoring order and revealing a clear reflection of the visitors.

Kapoor's use of raw paint pigment – a material formed of pure color that soaks up light and refutes the surface scrutiny allowed by his polished surfaces – was the foundation for a seminal series of pigment sculptures that will inhabit the two galleries flanking the central Temple.

These works are not only presented in the exhibition, but also integrate the audience into the surrounding architecture and environment, challenging the perceiving experience of the audience.

In addition to the huge accolades, Kapoor is also often questioned, such as in 2014, when a foreign company developed the world's darkest substance, which can absorb 99.965 percent of visible light so that the human eye cannot recognize what it sees. Anish Kapoor was granted exclusive rights to use the color in art, meaning that no other artist could use it. The news met with widespread opposition from artists. Some artists questioned that it had never been heard that an artist could monopolize a material.