From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping: a statue in Beijing is worth three years in prison

‘There is no such thing as art for art’s sake,’ said Mao Zedong shortly before becoming the leader of the People’s Republic of China, and twenty years later, in 1966, he set in motion his plan to eliminate the ‘Four Olds’ of Chinese society: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. In the name of the Cultural Revolution, Mao instructed the Red Guards to destroy any object or reference to the past; schools, libraries, statues, temples, churches and works of art were demolished, burnt and vandalised. There is not a single Chinese person who has not been affected by the events that led to the persecution of tens of millions of people, and the Gao brothers – Gao Qiang and Gao Zhen – transformed their grief over the arrest and death of their ‘counter-revolutionary’ father into catharsis, turning their trauma into their artistic journey. In the early 2000s, they exhibited their most famous works at clandestine exhibitions and private parties: satirical statues of the ‘Great Helmsman’, including ‘Guilt’, which depicts him kneeling in repentance before a portrait of their parents, the “Execution of Christ”, in which several statues of Mao aim their rifles at him, and the “Miss Mao” series featuring breasts and a nose as long as Pinocchio’s.

Mao had been dead for over thirty years by then, and the Gao brothers enjoyed a period of rare freedom and openness; the bronze statue of a repentant Mao, specially created in detachable parts, was packed into separate boxes to evade Chinese customs and be exhibited at international exhibitions. Then Chinese leader Xi Jinping took up the helm, declaring shortly after coming to power that “the purpose of art is to serve socialism and the people”, and in 2018 he introduced a law against the “defamation of national heroes and martyrs” to intensify the crackdown on all symbols deemed “unpatriotic”Under this law, which aims to “inspire the glorious spiritual strength of realising the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, statues and religious symbols – Muslim, Christian and Buddhist – have been torn down, and writers, comedians and artists have been arrested. Among them was Gao Zhen, now in his seventies and in poor health, who in August 2024, after returning to China to see his family, had more than 30 police officers raid his art studio in Sanhe, where 118 of his works were seized.

The trial took place behind closed doors and yesterday, after two years, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment – the maximum penalty – for sculptures created before the law came into force. Gao, having witnessed the arrest of his lifelong friends and colleagues such as Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, had moved to the United States with his brother in an increasingly repressive climate, taking his wife and son with him. Gao Qiang said that everyone had tried to dissuade him from returning to China; from New York, he posts a photo of his brother every day and describes his case as a repeat of the persecutions of the Cultural Revolution: it represents exactly “what our works were intended to criticise. Mao Zedong has been dead for almost half a century, yet his ghost continues to haunt China, harming the Chinese people”.