The Gao brothers, among the most renowned Chinese artists to emerge during the opening of China, have made their mark through their resolutely political work. A sign of an increasingly restricted space for freedom in China today, one of them, Gao Zhen, has been detained since August 26, information confirmed by Gao Qiang, their younger brother, who recently moved there to the United States.
The artist’s wife was informed by the public security bureau of Sanhe, a city east of Beijing, the day after the arrest. He is charged under a law passed in 2018 against “attacks on the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs”His lawyer was able to see him on Friday, August 30. His studio was raided by the police, who took photographs of some of the works, including sculptures depicting Mao Zedong. They could fuel a criminal case. Gao Zhen, his wife and son were to fly to the United States a few days later, although it is not possible to say whether this factor influenced his arrest.
Their family history was marked by the tragedy of Maoism, and the two brothers evoked this theme in much of their work together, produced from the mid-1980s onwards. Originally from Jinan, capital of the coastal province of Shandong, they were only 6 and 12 years old when, one day in 1968, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, their father was arrested, accused of being a class enemy. Twenty-five days later, his wife and six children were informed of his death. “suicide”which they had always doubted. The family later travelled to Beijing to protest to the central government against this injustice. In the end, they only received a paltry amount of compensation.
Mao’s obsession
The two brothers then studied fine arts. The bloody repression of the Tiananmen movement in the spring of 1989, for which they painted a “monument” (If time is reversed, memory 1989)only reinforces their denunciation of the crimes of the regime. They emerge from a generation of committed artists who try to overcome the limits of censorship, alongside the famous Ai Weiwei, and become pillars of Space 798, disused military factories in north-east Beijing that are transformed into artist studios at the beginning of the century. In the 2000s, while contemporary Chinese art is now attracting international collectors. One of the Gao brothers’ sculptures shows police officers forcibly taking away a prostitute. Another work depicts numerous naked individuals, locked in wooden boxes, one on top of the other, representing the straitjacket of Chinese society.
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