Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present new works by American artist Sarah Faux and Chinese artists Tao Siqi and Yan Xinyue at the 2023 edition of ZONAMACO in Mexico City.
Never straightforwardly legible as images, Sarah Faux’s (b. 1986, Boston, USA) paintings are rather most clear as emotional landscapes. The pair of paintings on view acts as a quartet, as each painting contains a doubling. In Identical, bright, artificial colors stand out like buoys in a sea of flesh tones. These artificial bits are plastic appendages, reaching towards each other to kiss. The painting appears like a landscape and also like a murky image, presenting itself in flashes. Clean and trim again contains mirrored repetition. Here is a hand curled up around scissors, snipping something, and there those scissors are appearing again. In this piece warm reds and browns, like flushed skin, cocoon around electric mustard yellows.
In Tao Siqi’s work (b. 1994, Wuhan, China) sexuality meets other forms of touch or pleasure through a unique, monochromatic approach to color. The intensity of the artist’s colors is mirrored in the subject matter. Her current body of work is simultaneously built off her large collection of archival images and the perception and experience of daily encounters, objects, digital images, and reading. In these new works, Tao uses highly saturated colors to portray close ups of body parts intertwined with lips, fingers, and chests, creating a calm yet eerie atmosphere. In addition to the “body” as an element of expression, Tao also emphasizes touch and intimacy between bodies in her works.
Yan Xinyue (b. 1992, Heilongjiang, China) portrays the tension in everyday life in the context of rapid urban development. She manipulates objects and subjects into different painterly forms, revealing the conflict between being a part of society and being an individual. Her paintings invite viewers to escape the solemnity of reality and enter a universe of imagination and possibilities. With the new works presented, Yan continues with the concept of the isolation one experiences under city life and portrays the human body from the angle of an outsider. The subjects of the paintings contrast in size in comparison to the environment they exist in.
The works in the stand are constructed around themes familiar to each artist’s sentiment; pleasure and pain, BDSM, abstract perceptions, mortality, and bodily fragility. Their characters are often echoed or mirrored within the canvas, as if they are observing themselves from outside their body in a state of a lucid dream. They involve a feeling of separation from one's body rebounded by doppelgängers.
