A Bangkok museum curator recently fled to London after Chinese and Thai officials pressured him to remove the names of Hong Kong, Uyghur, and Tibetan artists from an exhibition. Among them were artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yee Man, who had created an installation about espionage and whose name have been removed from the show, which was critical of authoritarian governments. The pressures was just one example of a growing campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to wipe out dissident artists and to ensure that only government-approved messages appear in galleries—both inside and outside China’s borders.
The pressure from Chinese officials in Thailand follows the arrest in January of Christian musician and performance artist Fei Xiaosheng, a resident of eastern Beijing’s Songzhuang art district. Fei’s friends believe authorities targeted him due to his public solidarity with the Hong Kong democracy movement. For decades, Fei had used symbolism in his installations to criticize the CCP, including, in a 2011 photography exhibit, the display of a blank wall in homage to then-detained artist Ai Weiwei. Before President Xi Jinping assumed power, artists like Fei tested the boundaries of political expression, leading to a boom in China’s contemporary art scene. But the space for artistic independence is narrowing fast as authorities try to use art to enforce a positive image of the CCP’s past.
A Bangkok museum curator recently fled to London after Chinese and Thai officials pressured him to remove the names of Hong Kong, Uyghur, and Tibetan artists from an exhibition. Among them were artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yee Man, who had created an installation about espionage and whose name have been removed from the show, which was critical of authoritarian governments. The pressures was just one example of a growing campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to wipe out dissident artists and to ensure that only government-approved messages appear in galleries—both inside and outside China’s borders.
The pressure from Chinese officials in Thailand follows the arrest in January of Christian musician and performance artist Fei Xiaosheng, a resident of eastern Beijing’s Songzhuang art district. Fei’s friends believe authorities targeted him due to his public solidarity with the Hong Kong democracy movement. For decades, Fei had used symbolism in his installations to criticize the CCP, including, in a 2011 photography exhibit, the display of a blank wall in homage to then-detained artist Ai Weiwei. Before President Xi Jinping assumed power, artists like Fei tested the boundaries of political expression, leading to a boom in China’s contemporary art scene. But the space for artistic independence is narrowing fast as authorities try to use art to enforce a positive image of the CCP’s past.
Two people stand before three large images, each on displayed on its own wall. In the first, a man holds an old vase; in the second, the vase hangs in midair as he drops it; and in the third, the shattered pieces lie at his feet.
Visitors view Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s piece Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn at an exhibit in Bologna, Italy, on Sept. 20, 2024.Roberto Serra/Iguana Press via Getty Images
Fei’s arrest came a few months after that of another prominent artist, Gao Zhen. A U.S. permanent resident, Gao Zhen was visiting China when police seized him in his studio outside Beijing in front of his wife and child who were traveling with him, on Aug. 26, 2024. Authorities said they detained him on suspicion of insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs.
“Our works are a critique of authoritarianism and a call for historical reflection, but they are not acts of defamation,” Gao Zhen’s brother and artistic partner, Gao Qiang, told me.
In 2011, I made a documentary film about the Gao brothers and the Songzhuang art district. The pair made provocative pieces depicting leaders such as Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Bin Laden. Gao Qiang said their work was an exploration “of the myths surrounding the authoritarian figures and the harm caused by their unchecked power.” At the time, Beijing granted the Gao brothers some latitude, allowing politically sensitive artwork to remain standing, covered in cloth, at the back of their studio.
The Gao brothers sold to U.S. movie stars and tycoons, like Leonardo DiCaprio and hedge fund mogul Steve Cohen, and exhibited in galleries around the world. I filmed the Beijing studio where workers prepared their art for shipment overseas, including a bronze statue titled “Mao’s Guilt,” depicting the Chinese leader on his knees, remorseful and supplicant. I watched as workers separated the sculpture into parts, ensconcing Mao Zedong’s head and body into individual boxes, partially obscuring its iconography from the Chinese customs authority, which approves all art for export.
Under Xi, the party has become ever more sensitive about historical memory. China’s law on “heroes and martyrs”, first introduced in 2018, attempts to force history into the CCP’s preferred narratives. Formal criminal punishments were added in 2021, as part of a newly amended criminal code. The law seeks to “inspire the glorious spiritual force of the realization of the China dream of the great renewal of the Chinese nation”; calls for society to “respect, learn from and defend” national heroes; and criminalizes their defamation with sentences of up to three years in prison. Its attempt to create a unified national memory inhibits artistic expression and interpretations that challenge the CCP’s authority. The government has created phone hotlines and apps for citizens to report violations of the law to authorities, and those arrested have included a blogger, a journalist, and citizens merely posting on social media.
Gao Qiang says the artworks the Chinese government is investigating were created more than 10 years ago, before the law was enacted, and that authorities are using his brother’s arrest to send a “chilling message to others: Stay in line or face the consequences.” Authorities have seized more than 100 of their artworks. The investigation is focused on a few pieces in particular: the statue “Mao’s Guilt”; the “Execution of Christ,” which features a half dozen life-sized bronze sculptures of Mao pointing bayonets at a sculpture of Jesus Christ; and the “Miss Mao” series, depicting the Chinese leader with an elongated nose and breasts.
Beijing is using this law to repress the work of artists in China, and extending its reach to pressure those who have fled, seeking refuge in free and democratic countries. Guo Jian, an artist living in Australia, has experienced the removal of his artwork from galleries and shows, and inducements to exhibit only paintings that meet the party’s preferred standards.
A woman shows a man a poster depicting Lei Feng. They are in a room with walls covered in Chinese posters.
A modern art dealer shows a customer a painting of Lei Feng in Beijing’s Panjiayuan market on Nov. 10, 2022. Mark Ralston/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Guo Jian began his career as a propaganda artist in the People’s Liberation Army. In 1989, he joined the protests in Tiananmen Square, and became an advocate for democracy. He began painting satirical takes on Cultural Revolution iconography, using, as he told me, “jokes to poke holes through China’s propaganda narratives.” Guo Jian has made Lei Feng, a soldier hero in the People’s Liberation Army, the subject of many of his paintings. Lei Feng featured in several significant 1960s propaganda campaigns, where he was a model of selfless service and devotion to Mao Zedong. The CCP is now resurrecting stories of Lei Feng for promotion across Chinese state media. In 2023, Xinhua News Agency quoted a hydropower station worker who prevented villages from flooding saying, “Times change, but we still need the ‘Lei Feng spirit. The things he did may seem trivial, but behind them was a nobility that we can all achieve.”
Guo Jian’s subversive paintings portray Lei Feng differently, like on the cover of Playboy magazine. “Political propaganda makes figures like Lei Feng the cover stars of reputable publications such as People’s Pictorial and People’s Liberation Army Pictorial, and they enjoy the same popularity as models on the cover of Playboy magazine. The difference lies in one publication being considered inappropriate while the other is deemed serious or falsely serious,” Guo Jian told me. He said the paintings are also a reflection on the readers of propaganda and Playboy magazine, as “passive audiences” and uncritical, unquestioning “objects of consumption.”
On the threats he has experienced in Australia from the CCP and the removal of his paintings from some Australian galleries, Guo Jian said, “When I was in China, [working] as a propaganda officer, I knew this kind of strategy. This is a tactic of separation, and isolation, and also changing you—changing the whole map of the art world to show to the world.”
Guo Jian and I were friends for many years in China, and in 2014 I filmed his Beijing studio. Over time, I watched his anger at CCP authorities grow, and when I visited his home that same year, Guo Jian showed me a diorama he had made of Tiananmen Square. He depicted the square as being under siege by bulldozers, to symbolize land seizures in China, and covered it with ground red meat, commemorating the brutality he witnessed during the 1989 protests. I knew, when I saw the diorama, that Guo Jian would face consequences. Chinese government authorities swiftly arrested him for showing it to me and another journalist, and within weeks they deported Guo Jian to Australia, where he had citizenship.
Now Gao Zhen is facing even more dire consequences for art that tells a story of China’s past differing from the CCP’s official and approved narratives. Gao Zhen’s family expects his trial to begin later this year, and fears a forced verdict. Authorities have placed an exit ban on his wife and 7-year-old son, preventing them from returning to their home in the United States. Their wealth and fame offer no protection in China, his brother, Gao Qiang, said.
A person sits on a stool and plays an accordion inside a bright red cage. Wire formations and various building supplies are outside of the cage.
Artist Kacey Wong plays the accordion inside a red mobile prison artwork called The Patriot, a protest performance art project, in an art studio in Hong Kong on Dec. 6, 2018.Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images.
As the government promotes art that rallies devotion to the party’s chosen heroes, Gao Qiang expects control over China’s art world to intensify further, limiting “historical reflection and free expression, strengthening the CCP’s ideological grip but potentially at the cost of cultural and intellectual vitality.” He said the consequences extend beyond the artists Beijing is persecuting to create a climate of fear throughout society, stifling critical discourse and innovation.
The CCP’s law on the protection of “heroes and martyrs” says it aims to “preserve the societal public interest” and inspire patriotism. But through its heavy-handed attempts to build a hegemonic story of its past, Beijing is damaging its credibility and may be compromising its future.
