“I’m a painter working as a sculptor,” Anish Kapoor once announced. It’s hard to imagine Kapoor as a painter. Think of his silver Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, or the whirlpool he erected in Brooklyn Bridge Park. But last year, the paintings Kapoor exhibited at Modern Art Oxford made waves. Horrific works created during the first days of the London lockdown, the paintings contained images of bloodletting and decapitation. “I’m not doing it intellectually,” he explained in The Guardian. “I have an obsession with red. My favourite colour of all, the one I use by the ton, is Alizirin crimson. It’s a very dark bloody Bordeaux wine red. What’s interesting about red is that it links to black so unbelievably easily. Red makes great darkness. And of course one might say red is fully a colour of the interior.” In this exhibition, which inaugurates Lisson’s first permanent space in Beijing, some of those shocking works from Oxford are on view. They are, according to Kapoor, an exploration of inner and outer states. —Elena Clavarino