Jesus Christ stands at gunpoint, palms upturned, seven figures in a firing squad around him. The bronze riflemen are unmistakable in their likeness. They are Mao Zedong, the long-deceased dictator who founded the People’s Republic of China, and presided over some of the most traumatic chapters in China’s recent history.
For decades, Chinese brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang have made a name for themselves with sculptures like this: irreverent contemporary artworks that skewer the authoritarian past, and present, of their native homeland.
The “Execution of Christ” was exhibited in 2009. So too was “Mao’s Guilt”: a life-sized replica of the so-called supreme leader kneeling in a pose of solemn contrition.
But it was only 15 years later that such works, satirising one of China’s most contentious idols, cost Gao Zhen his freedom.
The 69-year-old, who emigrated to the United States in 2022, was arrested at his studio on the outskirts of Beijing in mid-2024 while visiting with his family. Authorities seized his artworks and barred his wife and seven-year-old son from leaving the country.
Then, last month, Gao faced a secretive trial on suspicion of “insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs” – a charge that could see him jailed for up to three years.
The trial has received limited coverage in China, with most local reporting focusing on the circumstances of his arrest. At that time, some local media described him as a “so-called ‘artist’ who caters to Western political agendas through pseudo-art that vilifies and insults revered figures”.
But still, said Gao Qiang, the younger of the brothers, the trial’s “message is clear”.
“Even if a work was made 15 years ago, it can still be turned into a crime if today’s political climate changes,” he told the BBC.
Qiang says there has “clearly” been a hardening of Beijing’s backlash against perceived dissidence of late – stretching across visual arts, film, music, literature and online writing as part of “a wider pattern of tightening control”.
The Chinese government has not commented on the trial.
But China-watchers say this pattern is revealing of a CCP that is becoming increasingly extreme in both grasp and reach – policing its citizens transnationally and retroactively.
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