Capsule is pleased to present The Naked Eye, an exhibition of over twenty new oil paintings by Tao Siqi. Marking the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery, these jewel-like canvases glitter with private pleasures and dark fantasies. The exhibition runs from August 30th through November 1st, 2025 with an opening reception on August 30th, 2025.
Tao Siqi is not a morning person. She paints at night, and her work reflects that–the feeling of time stretching out in the quiet dark while the waking world rests. She crafts strange scenes of love, touch and abjection with quiet brushstrokes and delicate glazes. This exhibition’s title, The Naked Eye, evokes seeing without obstruction. This disrobing of sight itself provides a counter point to the painted nudity we expect. Contrary to the conventional gaze, a ‘naked eye’ suggests seeing more truthfully, acutely and with precision. Yet Tao Siqi never paints a full picture. Instead she crops, providing only fleeting glimpses into a lustful world.
While not always apparent at first, Tao Siqi’s impulse to paint springs from tenderness. Each piece is a small act of devotion, as the artist brings dignity to various types of love: caring, compulsive, taboo, ecstatic. She is also a painter of light. At times, the intimate glow of skin; at others, a spotlight’s stark interrogation. The artist uses light as a passage between reality and fantasy, often verging on the mystical. These illuminations are invocations of spells, solace, or rituals of exposure. Tao Siqi’s light wells up from deep within the canvas, igniting body parts like the flash of a match. Through layered glazes and gentle scumbling, her light gains an almost tactile presence.
In these pieces Tao Siqi deploys a more naturalistic palette than her earlier works, while retaining her signature surreal auras. On her canvases, color carries both humidity and toxicity: fluorescent-tinged pinks and purples, liquid-like crimson, skin tones that are soft yet tinged with melancholy. Muted greys and murky greens rumble at the edges with a repressed echo—they conjure distorted memories of touch, scent, and sound, giving her paintings a moist, dreamlike texture. These colors drift between beauty and pathology, seducing us with sweetness before abruptly jolting us awake. Drawing upon imagery from cinema, literature or endless online scrolling, Tao Siqi imbues contemporary tropes of desire with corporeal and sensory memories.
In particular, for this exhibition, Tao Siqi looked to Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending 1928 novel Orlando. The book spans several centuries, as Orlando transforms from a young nobleman into a woman across historical periods. Obsessed by Orlando’s slippery nature and ability to travel through time and gender with ease, Tao Siqi’s paintings manifest a similar fluidity. Mirror nods directly to a scene where Orlando catches her own reflection after shape-shifting from male to female. Taking in her new form, Orlando observes that “the change of sex, though it altered their future, altered nothing in their identity”[1]. In Tao Siqi’s version, we behold a shard of mirror from a first-person perspective. As the hand in Mirror becomes our own, the painting suggests that we may not recognize our own reflection. Although some pieces in this exhibition can be read as fairytale or parable, Tao Siqi’s insistent first-person POV unnerves again in the gem titled Fading. Our hand again; the burning of a dragonfly. How close can we get to this netherworld and still leave it unscathed?
Tao Siqi depicts gendered power relations bluntly, without presenting solutions to the complexities of dominance or submission. She does not judge the people, animals and spaces she paints. Instead Tao Siqi lets her subjects act as abjectly as they please. Her subjects often revel in some kind of jouissance–pleasure to the nth degree, pleasure that one loses one’s identity in, pleasure that morphs into something else. Take Mad Love, a stabbing: a young woman’s face is splattered with blood as she drives a knife into flesh with fixed fascination. Nearby, in Melting, a woman acts as a candlestick, head tilted back, candle jutting from mouth, hot wax dripping down her chin. Pleasure and pain merge in a smoky, Rembrandt-esque palette with equal parts neon light. As luminous as the candle it depicts, Melting is built sculpturally, touch by touch.
Sensations and perceptions are two separate things–there’s the sensation itself (hand on torso) and the perception of that touch (comfort or shock, etc.). So the effects of each lick, gulp or press are hard to predict. On top of that, pleasure isn’t always easy to access. As Tao Siqi indulges into taboo territory, she brings us all closer to desire. Do not look away. In fact: look closer. These works call upon us to deviate, to experiment and to embrace the truths perceived by our naked eyes, if we dare to look.
Text by Sarah Faux
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[1] Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Camberwell, Vic., Penguin, 2011.
