A Long Defeat is a project conceived specifically for Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, bringing together performance, installation, video, text, and sound to address the intellectual and cultural crises of our time. The title refers to an apparently impossible but noble struggle. In Zhu Tian's view, human history can be seen as a series of ‘long defeats’, with life itself being one against the inevitability of death. At the core of the project is a performance that reimagines the myth of Narcissus in a contemporary context—not as a simple tale of vanity but as a meditation on identity dissolution. It involves two synchronised performers, reflecting on modern narcissism, and its consequences—in particular, the inability to love beyond the self. This is accompanied by a sound piece composed by Zhu, layering electronic music with a storytelling of the Chinese mythological ghost tale The Painted Skin. The installations extend this exploration. Et in Arcadia Ego engages with the paradox of the Ancient Greek philosophical maxim about ‘self-knowledge’ and its modern implications, while SAD — an installation built from artificial sunlight lamps—plays on the dual meaning of ‘SAD’ as both a product for combating seasonal affective disorder and a metaphor for contemporary discontent, where it commodifies happiness, promising illumination while masking deeper unease. By engaging with these themes, the project seeks to rupture the smooth, frictionless experience of contemporary selfhood, offering instead a space where the audience might confront their own image—not as validation, but as a site of rupture, uncertainty, and, perhaps, the rediscovery of the ‘other’.