On May 14 2026, President Xi Jinping invoked the Thucydides Trap during the high stakes summit with President Trump in Beijing. As they discussed trade, technology, and superpower relations, my sculpture Thucydides Trap (2023) felt resonant. This scholars rock was made from hundreds of layered Financial Times pages. Torn headlines of trade wars, stock surges, supply chain crises, and geopolitical rivalry are compressed into an ancient, jagged form. Every crease and fissure carries the ink of yesterday’s markets, now fossilized into new techno sublime mountains of deep time. Drawing from classical Chinese scholars rocks or spirit stones that served as miniature mountains for contemplation I transformed the ephemeral scripture of global capitalism into a meditative object. Peach coloured FT sheets with their financial data and analysis forms the strata of the rock itself. Newsprint compresses the unthinkably complex matrix of the information space into a motif of nature; a landscape o...