The well-known Chinese artist Gao Zhen was arrested near Beijing last Monday in connection to a series of sculptures he had made criticizing Mao Zedong, his brother Gao Qiang has confirmed. He has been charged under the Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law, which prohibits any slander of historical figures who have been designated national heroes.
Gao Zhen, who is based in New York, was visiting relatives in China with his wife and family when he was detained. They had been planning to fly back to the U.S. on September 3.
The artworks in question predate the law, which was introduced in 2018 but, if he is found guilty, Gao Zhen could face up to three years in prison.
“The works the authorities collected as evidence are all from over ten years ago and belong to an old series from a different period,” said Gao Qiang said in a statement shared with Artnet News. “We are completely exhausted from dealing with the ghosts of the Cultural Revolution and have stopped creating such work.”
Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, more commonly known as the Gao Brothers, have worked collaboratively since the 1980s and are based between Beijing and the U.S. When they were children during the Cultural Revolution, when chairman Mao Zedong was in power, their father was labeled a “class enemy,” arrested, and allegedly committed suicide in jail.
Portraits of Mao have recurred often in the brothers’ work, including as the monstrous, feminized cartoon figure Miss Mao (2006) and Mao’s Guilt (2009), a bronze statue of the Communist leader on his knees as though confessing to terrible sins. With a detachable head, the statue is easy to decapitate.
Gao Zhen (left) and Gao Qiang (right) with Dagmar Carnevale Lavezzoli at the performance of the Gao Brothers’ “Utopia of the Embrace” at Spikersuppa in Oslo, Norway May 28, 2019. Photo: Kimberli Mäkäräinen, via Wikimedia Commons.
“They are detaining an artist who is nearly 70 years old under regulations that have been implemented only in the past two years,” Gao Qiang said. “This situation is exactly what those works were meant to critique.”
The artists’ open criticism of Mao and Cultural Revolution has come under state scrutiny before. From 1989 until 2003, they were on the government blacklist and forbidden to leave the country. In 2006, pieces by the Gao Brothers’s were among those police ordered taken down during a crackdown on politically sensitive works in Beijing’s Dashanzi art district.
Last month, a Florida attorney pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to two bombings against targets affiliated with China, one of which was the Gao Brothers’ 21-foot-tall, 8,800-pound stainless steel sculpture Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head (2009) in San Antonio, Texas.
The arrest of Gao Zhen raises questions about liability of other prominent Chinese artists from their generation, like Ai WeiWei and Wang Guangyi, who have also been openly critical of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
Gao Zhen has been held at the Sanhe City Detention Centre since August 26, when Chinese authorities raided his studio and seized evidence relating to sculptures of Mao from over a decade ago. The artist’s wife was informed the next day and his lawyers visited him on Friday.
Gao Qiang relayed a report from Gao Zhen’s lawyer Qu Zhenhong that the artist’s “mental state is stable, but his old back condition has flared up, causing him significant pain.”
The brothers’ artworks are held in private collections around the world, among them Steven Cohen and Charles Saatchi, as well as in museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and M+ in Hong Kong, although the latter has removed several images of their work from its website.
Vivienne Chow contributed reporting from Seoul.