Gao Zhen, of Chinese language Artist Duo Gao Brothers, Arrested in China

Chinese language artist Gao Zhen, who gained fame and recognition for creating politically charged artworks together with his brother Gao Qiang, was arrested in China, the New York Instances reported Monday.

Qiang instructed the Instances in an e mail that Zhen, who has lived within the US since 2022, was in China visiting household just lately when police in Sanhe Metropolis, a metropolis in Hebei close to Beijing, arrested him on “suspicion of slandering China’s heroes and martyrs.”

In early 2021, China handed a legislation making it a felony offense, punishable with as much as three years in jail, to slander China’s martyrs and heroes. A part of a protracted effort by Chinese language president XI Jinping’s efforts to crack down on dissent, this new legislation up to date a 2018 one.

“We have to educate and information the entire get together to vigorously carry ahead the pink custom,” Xi stated at a Communist get together assembly in 2021.

Because the ’90s, the Gao Brothers have produced sculptures, work, and performances that problem Communist orthodoxies, typically invoking Chinese language Communist Social gathering founder Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution of the Nineteen Sixties, and the 1989 Tiananmen Sq. protests and bloodbath.

In keeping with Gao Qiang, police raided the brothers’ artwork studio in late August and seized a number of of their artworks, all of which had been over ten years previous and had invoked the Cultural Revolution.

In an interview with the Guardian, Qiang maintained that the entire works had been made lengthy earlier than the brand new legislation went into impact.

“I consider that making use of retroactive punishment for actions that passed off earlier than the brand new legislation got here into impact contradicts the ‘precept of non-retroactivity’, which is a extensively accepted normal in fashionable rule of legislation. There’s a clear boundary between creative creation and felony behaviour,” he stated.

In the meantime, Qiang instructed Artnet Information that the present state of affairs “is strictly what these works had been meant to critique.”