On 10 May 2026, when artist Gao Zhen marked his 70th birthday in a Chinese prison, hundreds of artists, musicians, writers, human rights advocates, and cultural leaders worldwide called for his release and urged US President Donald Trump to raise Gao’s case directly with China’s President Xi Jinping at their personal summit meeting held days later.
In 2022, Gao emigrated to the US. In 2024, while in Beijing visiting his family, he was arrested, 100 of his artworks were seized, and his wife and seven-year-old son were banned from leaving China. Chinese media reports described Gao as a ‘so-called artist, who caters to Western political agendas through pseudo-art that vilifies and insults revered figures’. He was detained for ‘insulting, defaming, or otherwise infringing on the reputation and honour of heroes and martyrs’ – crimes of ‘historic nihilism’ or ‘distorting history’ under new laws enacted in 2018. Gao’s indictment focuses on satirical sculptures and installations he made between 2005 and 2009: notably, Execution of Christ, 2009, a bronze life-size installation of seven unmistakable likenesses of Mao Zedong aiming rifles at a figure of Christ. The firing squad represents a critique of authoritarian power and historical repression of Christianity in China.
Mao founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and presided over some of the most traumatic censorship in China’s recent history. He led the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which monopolised artistic creation, replacing traditional and diverse works with USSR-style Socialist Realism: art was required to serve ‘workers, peasants, and soldiers’, focusing on idealised portrayals of daily life and CCP leaders. Artists who criticised the CCP or failed to align with official aesthetic standards, such as using traditional ink painting, were persecuted and forced into ‘re-education’. From 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976, his Cultural Revolution policy was characterised by destruction of ‘Four Olds’: ideas, culture, customs, and habits. Art was reduced to ‘revolutionary romanticism’ and intense propaganda, artists were often forbidden to create, and many artworks were destroyed. After 1976, censorship relaxed slightly, allowing the introduction of Western techniques and the ‘85 New Wave’ (85NW): a nationwide avant-garde art movement, marking the birth of contemporary Chinese art. Artists rejected socialist realism, instead creating experimental, conceptual, and western-influenced art to explore new artistic languages and self-expression.
During the 1980s, 85NWflourished, primarily driven by artists born just before or during the Cultural Revolution, including the Gao Brothers, Zhen (born 1956) and Qiang (born 1962), and their friend Ai Weiwei (born 1957). Around 100 self-organized, avant-garde groups staged exhibitions and performances across China: they focused on social reform and freedom of expression, transitioning from strict realism to experimental practice. 85NW laid the foundation for Chinese art of the 1990s and beyond, challenging the traditional state-sanctioned art system, and was part of a larger, broader intellectual movement in the 1980s known as the ‘New Enlightenment’. However, in 1989, the CCP ordered an army massacre of thousands of protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, after which experimental art was repressed, and many artists worked ‘underground’ or in exile.
By 2003, a contemporary artistic community of over 30 artists, designers, and publishers had developed in a de-commissioned 50-year-old military factory complex in Beijing: the 798 Art District, where the Gao Brothers and Ai worked. In 2011, the CCP ordered closure of the Gaos’ studio, and Ai was arrested and detained for 81 days without charge. Following Ai’s release, his passport was confiscated and only returned after four years, when he was eventually allowed to leave China. In 2015, Ai emigrated to Germany, then moved to live in the UK and Portugal.
Since 2013, led by President Xi, there has been a significant expansion of art censorship, mass surveillance, and deterioration in human rights. In 2024, repression intensified, especially of critical depictions of Mao, Xi, or CCP policies. Artists often self-censor to avoid being monitored, harassed or arrested, and many hold private, word-of-mouth exhibitions to showcase forbidden work. In recent years, international institutions have been pressured to cancel exhibitions of Chinese art critical of the CCP. Dissident artists living abroad report digital harassment, and threats to their family members remaining in China, while enactment of new national security laws in Hong Kong has led to self-censorship by artists and art traders in the island-city.
In March 2026, after two years in prison, Gao Zhen was arraigned in a closed court. His one-day trial concluded without an immediate verdict, pending which he remains in custody. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison. His brother, Qiang, said ‘even if a work was made 15 years ago, it can still be turned into a crime if today’s political climate changes’, and that there has been a recent hardening of Beijing’s backlash against perceived dissidence, as part of ‘a wider pattern of tightening control’. The Chinese government has not commented on Gao Zhen’s trial. China-watchers say the CCP is becoming increasingly extreme, policing its citizens transnationally and retroactively, and they describe this period as perhaps the darkest in decades for freedom of expression under the CCP. Others suggest that sliding democratic norms around the world, particularly in the US under President Trump, have led Beijing to believe it can repress more aggressively without fear of rebuke from nations that appear to have abandoned the moral high ground themselves.
The United Nations Human Rights Office recently joined a growing chorus of international advocacy groups calling for Gao Zhen’s immediate release, saying his case ‘raises concerns with regard to retroactive application of criminal law and use of criminal sanctions to punish artistic expression’. There are also concerns for his health. His lawyer has found him reliant on a wheelchair on numerous occasions, and reports signs of malnutrition. Repeated applications for medical bail have been denied.
Ai continues to advocate for Gao Zhen, keeping his friend’s case in the international spotlight and, with hundreds of others, petitions for his release. In 2026, Thames and Hudson published Ai’s essay, ‘On Censorship’, which explores the evolution of censorship from authoritarian states to western democracies. Ai argues that, while China’s censorship is ideological and overt, western institutions also practice a form of corporate and institutional censorship, and warns against the rise of globalised surveillance and digital control – whatever political system we find ourselves living under.
© Henry Lydiate 2026