Talk by Yanxiao He, Post-doc Research Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Thursday, January 15, 2026
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Bunche Hall 3156
Cosponsored with Global Antiquity (Humanities Division, UCLA College). Part of class for CHIN186.
In standard academic textbooks and mainstream scholarship on media history, reflections on mass culture by ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, are often cited as foundational background. Yet this narrative contains a significant blind spot: it overlooks the fact that the true maturation of ancient mass culture critics unfolded not in classical Greece, but in the Roman Empire, particularly in its Hellenic-speaking eastern provinces from the first century CE onward. Confronted with pantomime performances staged in theatres capable of accommodating over ten thousand of spectators, intellectual elites of the Roman imperial world, from Dio Chrysostom to Emperor Julian, developed an analytical system of media criticism far more systematic and theoretically rigorous than anything proposed by the classical Greek thinkers.
A central debate emerging from this material concerns representational authority in Greek antiquity as refracted through the imperial Roman East: who could represent the Hellenic legacy before the masses: elite orators, or pantomime dancers? The recent and widely discussed musical drama The Summoning of Dunhuang by the National Theatre of China, starring the K-pop veteran Lay Zhang, provides a compelling contemporary case through which to consider this ancient Roman question. This drama has drawn over 133,000 audiences and has sparked an unprecedented renewed interest among Chinese youth in Dunhuang studies. Given Lay Zhang’s popular appeal, this moment reenacts, in inverted form, the imperial Roman debate over who possesses the cultural authority to educate the populace: rhetorical elites or mass pantomime performers.
First, by using techno-state capitalism (TSC) as an analytical framework, I argue the drama not only reflects the imagined labor conditions of academic workers but also performs the aesthetics of TSC itself: casting a celebrity whose career has been deeply entangled with this political economic configuration as its main protagonist. My analysis of the drama and its accompanying media ecosystem also foregrounds gender as a critical dimension. I explore the relationship between Lay and the predominantly female fanbase that attended the show, who are simultaneously positioned as recipients of Dunhuang-related knowledge. I examine the romantic plotlines in the drama, such as the relationship between Zhang Ran (played by Lay) and his girlfriend Lin Zhixiu, who departs to study Dunhuang in Paris, as well as the marital breakup between Chang Shuhong and Chen Zhixiu, his wife who cannot follow his Dunhuang dream, as well as a female Dunhuang researcher and Lay himself in a video clip circulated on the social media platform.
Second, by juxtaposing imperial Roman critics of pantomime with this Dunhuang-themed drama, this talk demonstrates how ancient Roman cultural discourses may illuminate contemporary cultural dynamics. In doing so, it carries out what cultural critic Kuen-hsin Chen has advocated “Asia as method,” by bringing contemporary East Asian case studies into critical dialogue with ancient Greco-Roman texts, and allowing each to provincialize, interrogate, and reconfigure the other.
Yanxiao He (he/him) received his PhD in ancient history from the University of Chicago. He is now the Shuimu Post-doc Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His research revolves around the Hellenistic and Roman East, Greek novels and Roman pantomime, and classical receptions in East Asian popular culture. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Performance Road: Theatricality and Ethnography in Long Hellenistic Asia. His English writings appeared or will appear in Dance Chronicle, American Journal of Philology, Classical Quarterly, Classical World, Classical Receptions Journal, and Chinese Studies in History. His scholarship has been recognized by the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize and the Erich S. Gruen Prize from the Society for Classical Studies.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies