Zhang Xiao: National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance

The Chinese idiom “National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance” (国色天香), originally used to describe the peonies of Luoyang, once embodied, more than a thousand years ago, the collective imagination of an empire at the heart of the Central Plains in its pursuit of ultimate beauty. Sumptuous, dignified, and exuberant, the peony reflected the grandeur and cosmopolitan splendor of the Tang dynasty, an era celebrated for its openness to the world and its embrace of diverse cultures.

Yet as the scroll of history turns to the present, and we once again gaze upon these four characters—“National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance”—they seem to have transformed into a vast prism of irony. In an age that appears, on the surface, to be flourishing, what they reveal is often not the true face of prosperity, but a spiritual wasteland embellished by filters—a spectacle of a false golden age, amplified to an unprecedented scale by the relentless pursuit of online traffic.

Within the algorithmically constructed filter bubbles of our information landscape, we have become immersed in an endless stream of sensory stimulation, gradually losing our capacity for sustained and critical thought. In an online environment increasingly charged with hostility, even the slightest disagreement can escalate into large-scale online harassment and mutual hostility.

We possess an unprecedented material shell: cities glow with neon, and material abundance has reached extraordinary levels. Yet we are steadily losing the spirit that sustains this shell. These seemingly beautiful spectacles of disorder resemble flowers made of plastic: their colors remain perpetually vivid, their fragrance forever intense, yet they possess neither life nor roots, neither a sense of compassion for life nor a reverence for its inherent dignity.