Imagine walking through China’s twentieth century as if it were a single exhibition. In one room, Qi Baishi’s shrimp hover in pale ink - so little pigment, and yet an entire tradition pulses in the wrist: brush pressure, empty space, the quiet confidence of forms that have survived dynasties. In the next, Dong Xiwen’s The Founding Ceremony of the Nation lifts Mao onto a bright balcony, oil paint and perspective mobilized to make history look inevitable. Turn a corner and the gallery fills with books and hanging scrolls, but Xu Bing has removed the possibility of reading: thousands of characters that resemble Chinese dissolve into pure surface, the authority of writing becoming a beautiful void. And then, abruptly, a three-frame sequence: Ai Weiwei releases a Han urn, and the past breaks on the floor.

This essay argues that art in modern and contemporary China lives in these collisions, between tradition and modernity, preservation and rupture, where aesthetics becomes a battleground for memory and power.

In Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud (2024), Christina Quarles stages a body that will not stay still - splitting, doubling and sliding down the canvas, as if it might spill into the gallery itself. Hung almost alone on a wide white wall in the Stedelijk’s Tomorrow is a Different Day presentation, the painting turns the room into a small, uncertain stage, where identities buckle under the weight of being seen and misread at once. Rather than offering consolation, Quarles inverts the familiar proverb and leaves us with something more demanding: an invitation to linger in the in-between, where joy drags its shadows and clarity never quite arrives.

Inside a small studio a painter turns quietly back to her easel, mixing colour and touching the canvas with slow confidence. Around her, portraits line the walls like silent witnesses, watching as another image begins to appear. For a moment the whole room feels like it is breathing in time with her brush.

To gaze upon this fresco is to bear witness not merely to the Last Judgment, but to the human condition itself - our frailty, our longing, our search for grace. Suspended between heaven and earth, the dome becomes both a visual sermon and a mirror of the soul. Beneath its celestial eye, we are not just spectators, but participants in a vast, unfolding drama of light, shadow and spiritual yearning.

Brunelleschi’s dome at Florence Cathedral stands as a triumphant fusion of engineering ingenuity, humanist ideals and artistic vision - an enduring symbol of the Renaissance spirit and humanity’s boundless creative potential.

Michelangelo’s David is not merely a masterpiece of sculpture, but a profound embodiment of Renaissance ideals - uniting physical perfection, intellectual contemplation and spiritual dignity in a single, timeless moment of poised humanity.

Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod (1630) is not just a scene, but a warning. Under a sky torn by divine wrath, a city collapses into chaos. Bodies writhe, prayers vanish and judgment descends in silence.

Exploring the Polyptych of Saint Catherine - a Gothic masterpiece where form, faith and memory intertwine.

Here, past and present walk side by side.
In the shadow of Pisa’s ancient walls, the Parco di Stampace offers a quiet space to pause - where ivy climbs and time slows.

An archway where time lingers - frescoes fading above the rhythm of the city below.