Kapoor’s first solo museum show in China, divided between two locations, presented some of the artist’s most significant and celebrated works of his last thirty-five years. At the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (CAFAM), Kapoor weaved his monumental installations through the contemporary curvilinear exhibition spaces, presenting four performative artworks central to his recent practice.

Visitors were first greeted by Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013), transforming the central atrium of the museum into a landscape activated by a machine calmly processing masses of aggregating material. The work deposits bricks of red wax along several ascending conveyor belts, before plummeting into a molten heap of their own making. This system – watched over by a vast, red sun that hovers above the scene – takes place with no evident human interaction; the artist’s hand is replaced by a seemingly autonomous, invisible machine that allows the viewer an opportunity to commune directly with the mysterious entity, giving rise to a subjective experience.