Gao Zhen, of the Artist Duo Gao Brothers, Arrested in China on Slander Charges

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

Qiang told the Times in an email that Zhen, who has lived in the US since 2022, was in China visiting family recently when police in Sanhe City, a city in Hebei near Beijing, arrested him on “suspicion of slandering China’s heroes and martyrs.”

In early 2021, China passed a law making it a criminal offense, punishable with up to three years in prison, to slander China’s martyrs and heroes. Part of a long effort by Chinese president XI Jinping’s efforts to crack down on dissent, this new law updated a 2018 one.

“We need to educate and guide the whole party to vigorously carry forward the red tradition,” Xi said at a Communist party meeting in 2021.

Since the ’90s, the Gao Brothers have produced sculptures, paintings, and performances that challenge Communist orthodoxies, often invoking Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

According to Gao Qiang, police raided the brothers’ art studio in late August and seized several of their artworks, all of which were over ten years old and had invoked the Cultural Revolution.

In an interview with the Guardian, Qiang maintained that all of the works were made long before the new law went into effect.

“I believe that applying retroactive punishment for actions that took place before the new law came into effect contradicts the ‘principle of non-retroactivity’, which is a widely accepted standard in modern rule of law. There is a clear boundary between artistic creation and criminal behaviour,” he said.

Meanwhile, Qiang told Artnet News that the current situation “is exactly what those works were meant to critique.”