Artist and Gao Brothers member Gao Zhen, who has been held in a Chinese detention center for nearly a year on accusations of violating the country’s infamously repressive anti-defamation laws, has hired a leading human rights lawyer to represent him in court after refusing to plead guilty and accept a three-year prison sentence.
Sources close to the case told Hyperallergic that Mo Shaoping, one of China’s most eminent defense lawyers who represented Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and the imprisoned journalist Shi Tao, will be Gao Zhen’s attorney in the trial, expected to begin in about a month.
Chinese authorities arrested the 69-year-old artist last August while he was visiting family in Hubei province. He was charged with “defaming the honor and reputation of heroes and martyrs” over 15-year-old satirical artworks of People’s Republic of China founder Mao Zedong. Inspired by the memory of their father, a counterrevolutionary who was taken as a political prisoner in 1968 and died while in detention, Gao Zhen and his brother Gao Qiang’s works have served as both a means to express their grief and critique the regime.
Gao Zhen has since been held in Sanhe City Detention Center and faces up to three years in prison, as stipulated by an amendment to the country’s Criminal Law passed in 2021 under President Xi Jinping. As noted in a petition calling for Gao Zhen’s release, “the referring artworks of Gao Zhen … were created years before this law was enacted.”
“This is a violation of international standards of jurisdiction and a violation of human rights,” reads the petition, which has over 20,000 signatures.
Gao Zhen is a United States permanent resident and green card holder, but Chinese authorities have prohibited his spouse and their young child, also a US citizen, from leaving the country. They have also seized more than 100 artworks from the sibling duo’s storage as potential incriminating evidence, according to an update on the Change.org petition. It is unclear which artworks were taken; however, according to the update, the majority of these works have never been publicly displayed in China. They also include “a piece that had previously been exhibited at the European Union delegation in Beijing.”
The case has caught the attention of international governments, media outlets, human rights organizations, and activists and artists including Ai Weiwei, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses who has been living in exile for a decade. In addition, multiple free speech groups and artists have signed onto a joint letter led by the Human Rights Foundation decrying his detention and the Chinese government’s censure of free speech.
“[Gao Zhen’s] works are bold critiques of the Cultural Revolution and former Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and his authoritarian rule of the country,” the letter read.
“His detention is not just a violation of his rights but a blatant abuse of power and an attack on the fundamental human freedoms of all Chinese people who have the right to learn the truth about dictator Mao Zedong,” the missive reads.
