The exhibition Thucydides Fever Dream traces the hallucinatory cadence of history as manifest in multiple facets of contemporary Chinese life, culture, and geopolitical relations, be it to the West (ancient and modern), the former Eastern bloc, Central Asia, or Africa. Just like recent years’ improbable social media trend of Chinamaxxing, China’s renewed fascination with Greco-Roman classics as both statecraft (evident in Xi’s evocation of “Thucydides Trap” during Trump’s 2026 visit to Beijing) and vernacular metaphor (young people referring to adulting struggles as their “Odyssey era”) illustrates a perpetual dynamic wherein any self-fashioning, and indeed self-knowledge, is forged through other(s), in porous and often adversarial relationships.
As such, whether one knows what the “Thucydides Trap” means (a concept in political theory, inspired by the Athenian historian from twenty-six centuries ago, that describes the inevitability of war when a rapidly rising power challenges a ruling one) is less important than delighting in the ways that history and cultural production can unfold like fan fiction, full of callbacks, digressions, goofy impulses, and wild liberties in reinterpretation, where things tend to be the most alive, problematic, and transcendent. A consummate example can be found, for instance, in the way the art historian Thomas Crow revisits Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) through the lens of 1960s counterculture and by way of an unexpected encounter with contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose strategic removal of historical figures from iconic historical tableaux ranges from absurd to outright subversive. Or in the way Hao Liang gently collapses two lineages of portraiture by attaching a chiseled chin that may have been painted by Sandro Botticelli to the upper face of a blue-eyed Arhat (disciples of the historical Buddha with a rich and varied iconography in Chinese painting and sculpture). An exercise of whim as much as of skill, Hao Liang’s ink-on-silk Red Nose (2017) finds its counterpart in the closely cropped head study by an eighteen-year-old Anthony van Dyck, who, at the time he executed this oil sketch of vivid pathos, was newly apprenticed in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens.
And if we are to stretch the pedagogical transmission to several centuries, we would find the painter Ilya Repin and his late nineteenth-century peers calibrating what they had learned from the likes of van Dyck and Rembrandt (available for close emulation in the Hermitage) toward a compelling, morally responsive form of realism, on which Socialist Realism was later modeled. The Soviet cultural and ideological machine, synchronized to China’s own revolutionary throes and needs, would help establish a rigorous curriculum foregrounding realism in China’s art academy system that remains in effect to this day. Its reach also extends far beyond the academy: Hou Yimin, a prot.g. of the Soviet specialist Konstantin Maksimov who taught in Beijing in the 1950s, was tasked with designing the third and fourth series of renminbi banknotes (in circulation from 1962 to 2018), which deployed a distinct lexicon of representational politics: peasants, workers, intellectuals, scenes of productive labor and industry, key ethnic minority groups. One of these banknotes can be found—alongside toy marbles—in artist Qiu Xiaofei’s Heilongjiang Box (2006), an artist’s book that contemplates childhood memorabilia and indoctrinations.
The exhibition Thucydides Fever Dream traces the hallucinatory cadence of history as manifest in multiple facets of contemporary Chinese life, culture, and geopolitical relations, be it to the West (ancient and modern), the former Eastern bloc, Central Asia, or Africa. Just like recent years’ improbable social media trend of Chinamaxxing, China’s renewed fascination with Greco-Roman classics as both statecraft (evident in Xi’s evocation of “Thucydides Trap” during Trump’s 2026 visit to Beijing) and vernacular metaphor (young people referring to adulting struggles as their “Odyssey era”) illustrates a perpetual dynamic wherein any self-fashioning, and indeed self-knowledge, is forged through other(s), in porous and often adversarial relationships.
As such, whether one knows what the “Thucydides Trap” means (a concept in political theory, inspired by the Athenian historian from twenty-six centuries ago, that describes the inevitability of war when a rapidly rising power challenges a ruling one) is less important than delighting in the ways that history and cultural production can unfold like fan fiction, full of callbacks, digressions, goofy impulses, and wild liberties in reinterpretation, where things tend to be the most alive, problematic, and transcendent. A consummate example can be found, for instance, in the way the art historian Thomas Crow revisits Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) through the lens of 1960s counterculture and by way of an unexpected encounter with contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose strategic removal of historical figures from iconic historical tableaux ranges from absurd to outright subversive. Or in the way Hao Liang gently collapses two lineages of portraiture by attaching a chiseled chin that may have been painted by Sandro Botticelli to the upper face of a blue-eyed Arhat (disciples of the historical Buddha with a rich and varied iconography in Chinese painting and sculpture). An exercise of whim as much as of skill, Hao Liang’s ink-on-silk Red Nose (2017) finds its counterpart in the closely cropped head study by an eighteen-year-old Anthony van Dyck, who, at the time he executed this oil sketch of vivid pathos, was newly apprenticed in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens.
And if we are to stretch the pedagogical transmission to several centuries, we would find the painter Ilya Repin and his late nineteenth-century peers calibrating what they had learned from the likes of van Dyck and Rembrandt (available for close emulation in the Hermitage) toward a compelling, morally responsive form of realism, on which Socialist Realism was later modeled. The Soviet cultural and ideological machine, synchronized to China’s own revolutionary throes and needs, would help establish a rigorous curriculum foregrounding realism in China’s art academy system that remains in effect to this day. Its reach also extends far beyond the academy: Hou Yimin, a prot.g. of the Soviet specialist Konstantin Maksimov who taught in Beijing in the 1950s, was tasked with designing the third and fourth series of renminbi banknotes (in circulation from 1962 to 2018), which deployed a distinct lexicon of representational politics: peasants, workers, intellectuals, scenes of productive labor and industry, key ethnic minority groups. One of these banknotes can be found—alongside toy marbles—in artist Qiu Xiaofei’s Heilongjiang Box (2006), an artist’s book that contemplates childhood memorabilia and indoctrinations.
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