NY Artist Gao Zhen, 70, Gets Three Years in China Over Mao Sculptures

A 70-year-old sculptor who has called New York home was sentenced to three years in prison by a Chinese court over satirical artworks depicting Mao Zedong that he made nearly two decades ago. Gao Zhen, detained in Beijing roughly two years before the sentencing according to his wife, was found guilty of slandering one of China's heroes, and the sentence handed down represents the maximum penalty he could have received.

According to The New York Times, the Sanhe City People's Court in Hebei province found Gao Zhen guilty of slandering one of China's heroes and martyrs, a conviction tied to sculptures he made and displayed in Beijing back in 2009. That prosecution relied on Article 299(1) of China's Criminal Law, a provision that only took effect on March 1, 2021, and was applied retroactively to artworks created between 2005 and 2009, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders. The law penalizes “insulting, defaming, or infringing on the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs” with up to three years behind bars, and its retroactive use against decades-old sculptures is part of why legal scholars and human rights groups have called the prosecution unlawful.

Sculptures That Put a Kneeling Mao on Trial

The works at the center of the case include “Mao's Guilt,” a 2009 piece depicting a kneeling bronze Mao Zedong seeking forgiveness, “The Execution of Christ,” which portrays seven Mao figures aiming rifles at Jesus, and the “Miss Mao” bust series featuring exaggerated breasts and Pinocchio noses, per the same 2009 record cited by Religion Unplugged. Gao Zhen and his younger brother, Gao Qiang, created “Mao's Guilt” together and displayed it in Beijing in 2009, working under the collective name the Gao Brothers. The duo became famous in the early 2000s for satirical and provocative artworks about politically sensitive topics, including the Cultural Revolution — the decade of political turmoil unleashed by Mao — and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Gao Zhen was detained in Beijing while emigrated to the United States as a legal permanent resident. Court records described by the Times indicate his family and U.S. diplomats were barred from attending the closed-door hearing in March, which took place over a single day. European Union representatives and U.S. diplomats who separately attempted to observe the March 30 proceeding at the Sanhe People's Court were also denied entry by Chinese court officials, according to The Guardian.

A Family Marked by the Cultural Revolution

Gao Zhen's two brothers attended the sentencing hearing, and Gao Qiang, who lives in New York and worked with his brother on the Mao sculptures, said history will ultimately judge whether an artist can be imprisoned for confronting history through art. The brothers' fixation on Mao and state violence traces back to their own childhood: in 1968, when Gao Zhen was 12 and Gao Qiang was 6, their factory-worker father was arrested as an alleged counterrevolutionary and died in state custody, according to background published by e-flux. That loss shaped decades of work confronting Mao-era trauma, work that eventually earned the Gao Brothers their first U.S. museum retrospective, “Gao Brothers: Grandeur and Catharsis,” held at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City from September 2010 to January 2011.

When police detained Gao Zhen in Yanjiao, Hebei province, on August 26, 2024, approximately 30 officers raided his art studio and confiscated more than 100 of his artworks, many of which had never been publicly exhibited in China, according to a joint statement from Freedom House. Gao Zhen had become a legal permanent resident of the United States and moved to New York in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he was detained while making a family visit back to China. His wife, Zhao Yaliang, was placed under a national security exit ban following his arrest, preventing their 7-year-old son, a U.S. citizen named Gao Jia, from returning home to school in New York, the same statement notes.

Failing Health Behind Bars, Art That Continued Anyway

During his pre-trial incarceration at Sanhe City Detention Center, Gao Zhen suffered severe physical decline, including lumbar spine disease requiring periodic wheelchair use, knee effusion, an eye condition, and chronic hives requiring daily medication, per Chinese Human Rights Defenders. Even under those conditions, he kept making art, crafting paper collages out of torn colored scraps and writing personal letters to his family, according to NPR.

Gao Zhen will serve one more year in prison after two years' detention already served, and he plans to appeal the court's decision, per the Times' reporting by Lily Kuo. Whether that appeal will succeed, whether the exit ban on his wife and son will be lifted, and how diplomatic pressure from Washington and Brussels might shape his treatment going forward all remain open questions.