Seeds of Fire

無恥之尤

Journalist Marije Vlaskamp’s essay on the Gao Brothers 高氏兄弟 — Gao Zhen 高兟 and Gao Qiang 高强 — reproduced below, is all but unreadable, even unbearable. That’s because Vlaskamp describes dilemmas and agonies of conscience that have been part of my own life for nearly half a century. It also describes the fate of other friends in the Xi Jinping era.

When launching China Heritage ten years ago — in December 2016 — I suggested some ways in which scholars and writers might be able to cope with Xi Jinping’s China (see Cutting a Deal with China). In September 2023, I expanded on that advice in an essay titled Ethical Dilemmas — notes for academics who deal with Xi Jinping’s China. There I noted that:

From the early 1980s, the focus of my work was on the cultural figures of the Republican era who had been caught between political extremes. Relegated to the “dustbin of history” after 1949, they were now gradually reevaluated as being crucial to China’s agonized search for modernity. My interests granted me entrée to a revived world of letters and publishing, just as a sensibility formed by the counterculture of the 1960s led to my involvement with the unofficial arts scene. Both aspects of my work skirted around the forbidden zones of Communist Party ideology. As a result, by failing to “stay in my lane” and as an academic who also wrote for the mass media, translated contemporary authors, and frequently broached topics that were permitted one moment and outlawed the next, I frequently found myself at odds with the party-state.

Over the decades, I often had to avoid Chinese friends, change travel plans and pursue more anodyne interests in an attempt to frustrate the irrepressible desire of the state to use my presence and my work as an excuse to persecute others. In this context, see also:

• The Curse of Great Leaders — the Xi Jinping decade and beyond

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In 2026, a plethora of China Maxxers, Kumbayistas and New China experts dig deeply into the shallows of contemporary China. As part of what is variously called a vibe-shift and a reset, nettlesome issues and red-line subjects are blithely bypassed. This is the Communist Party’s real China Dream: international acceptance, validation and unquestioning promotion or what elsewhere we have called the Brave New World of 1984 in 2026.

Not that I necessarily want to ‘ick the yum’ of the latest crop of China Kumbayistas, but there are many lessons that anyone with a more than superficial interest in Chinese lives, culture and history may wish to learn, be it sooner or later. Or maybe not. After all, in the world of ‘click-like-and-subscribe’ IRL is not as important as mogging. It is marvellous to behold the China Maxxing era of 2025-2026 in which the uncomfortable realities of the ‘before time’ — Beijing’s revival of Maple-Bridge-style surveillance from 2008, the gradual crushing of Chinese civil society from 2011, the purge of rights lawyers, the silencing of civilian journalists and independent academic debate, the repression of Hong Kong, the ongoing clampdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet, the egregious mishandling of Covid-19, the tireless censorship of the internet and so on and so forth — have to all intents and purposes been relegated to the Memory Hole. The memory hole has also engorged Gao Zhen.

The Maxxers might as well emblazon T-shirts with the old motto of Elizabeth I: video et taceo — ‘I see and keep silent’.

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This essay is included as a multipart chapter in Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual 2026 which commemorates Chinese voices of conscience. The eight interconnected essays in Kumbaya China: I’ve Seen the Future are:

• 2026 — A Brave New 1984
• Covid Lessons for Kumbayistas
• Smug Alert! China Maxxing and the New Experts
• The Universality of Asian Values
• No Country for Old Dissidents and The Gao Brothers
• US China Studies Challenged by a Challenged China IR Scholar
• The Velvet Prison Goes Global
• The Future Will Be Better, or at Least the Food Will Be

Marije Vlaskamp’s essay ‘Gao Brothers’ touches on Ai Weiwei, a controversial artist who, following a brief return trip to Beijing in late 2025, has become even more controversial. He is the subject of the other part of this chapter, one that starts with A View on Ai Weiwei’s Exit, an essay that I published in June 2011.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
20 February 2026

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Gao Brothers

Marije Vlaskamp

My own face is staring back at me from the Facebook page of the Gao Brothers. They are Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, two Chinese brothers who create avant-garde art together. The photo is a fourteen-year-old selfie of the three of us on Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt. We are staring tensely into the lens; there isn’t a hint of a smile.
Do I give this memory a heart emoji, or a crying face because of current events? Because the present situation is heartbreaking: the elder of the two, 69-year-old Gao Zhen, has been wasting away for a year and a half in a detention center just outside the Chinese capital, Beijing.

From New York, his younger brother Gao Qiang (63) posts a photo of his brother on Facebook every day to keep attention focused on him. After more than five hundred days of pretrial detention, a handful of likes counts for a lot. And a heart from me, because there is nothing more I can do.

The Martyrs Law

“Don’t go to China,” friends had warned Gao Zhen.

The brothers had moved to New York years ago, where artistic freedom is greater than in an ever more restrictive Beijing. Gao Zhen nevertheless traveled to China with his wife and young son. There, just days before his return flight to New York on August 26, 2024, he was arrested on suspicion of violating a law that criminalizes insulting martyrs and national heroes, punishable by up to three years in prison.

The evidence allegedly consists of artworks the Gao Brothers created two decades ago — suggesting that this so-called Martyrs Law is now being applied retroactively for the first time.

“That’s news, but I can’t do anything with it,” I said as I passed the information on to a colleague. As a journalist, you don’t write about your friends — not even when they become the news. Personal emotions obstruct journalistic judgment: everything surrounding Gao Zhen feels like world news to me.

It is also not journalistically responsible to fill in what I don’t know — for instance, what his bad back must feel like on the concrete floor of a police cell.

Longing for Friends

As a correspondent in China from 2001 to 2019, I resolved the ethical dilemma of friendship versus work in a simple way: by not forming deep personal bonds with the people in my stories. I preferred a network of professional contacts to a circle of Chinese friends I wouldn’t be able to write about.

The Gao Brothers entered my life at a moment when I was longing for friends. In the autumn of 2010, I had just initiated my divorce when a fellow correspondent arrived with a book from the dixia [地下] — the underground scene. In the alternative art district 798, she had picked up a catalogue full of photos of naked Chinese bodies.

“Penises, pubic hair, sculptures with enormous breasts — what more could one want? We’re going to see the makers, the Gao Brothers. That’ll cheer you up,” she said.

Although it wasn’t my habit, the friendship quietly took root.

At the office the internet was down — yet another outage since the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the critical writer Liu Xiaobo. Liu was serving an eleven-year prison sentence and was unable to collect the prize in Oslo. People I had previously spoken to about Liu were no longer answering their phones, so when I heard that the Gao Brothers considered Liu a kindred spirit, I didn’t hesitate to grab my coat and visit their studio.

Chinese men are not usually very touchy, but the brothers embraced me before I even had a chance to introduce myself. They had made hugging their trademark with their World Hug Day project, in which random strangers — clothed or naked — embrace one another for twenty minutes at a photogenic location.

Uncompromising Work

After their warm hug, I fell head over heels for their art. Some Western critics dismiss their work as “Chinese pop art” and consider it too heavy-handed, expecting a certain subtlety from Chinese art. But there is nothing subtle about the story the Gao Brothers tell about the authoritarian one-party state.

In their studio I saw the difference between their carefully thought-out, uncompromising work and the lazy pastiches with political motifs that many Chinese artists used to earn good money. At the time, 798 was packed with galleries selling silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong surrounded by McDonald’s logos and dollar signs. That toothless stuff was sold on every corner.

The Gao Brothers’ work rarely left the studio, because the Great Helmsman fared much worse in their hands. They distorted Mao into the caricature that haunted their nightmares. Mao presented himself as the mother of the Chinese nation, Gao Qiang explained, so they gave him a generous bosom — and a Pinocchio nose, for all the lies they had heard about the wonderful new world Mao was supposedly building.

Around 2007, Miss Mao dominated their work in every color and form: a golden Miss Mao masturbating while giving birth to a red dragon; a silver Miss Mao balancing on a bust of the Russian revolutionary Lenin; a black Miss Mao presenting a skull on a serving tray. Even when they tried to create something else, a Miss Mao would emerge — such was the brothers’ obsession with their childhood trauma.

In 1968, their father never returned home from his job at a machine factory. This happened to many Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic decade of arbitrary political violence. Gao Zhen was twelve and Gao Qiang six when they learned that their father had taken his own life in detention. The suicide, condemned at the time as a “counter-revolutionary crime,” shaped the rest of their lives.

After all the Miss Maos, the brothers were ready for a reckoning in 2009. The result was the bronze sculpture Guilt: Mao kneeling in remorse before a portrait of the brothers’ parents.

The sculpture was shown only at private parties; otherwise it stood disassembled in a corner of their workshop, its detached head tucked away in an old duvet.

No Trouble

The brothers were cautious. They didn’t want trouble; their art was provocative enough already, even after they moved beyond Mao as their central subject around 2008.

The state was never far away, especially after a police station became their next-door neighbor in 2007. Sometimes the authorities intervened — for example, when the brothers wanted to attend Liu Xiaobo’s trial.

They were placed under house arrest for three days.

After I discovered dissident Liu in a photomontage from their series The Forever Unfinished Building, the rest of my studio visit became professional. Naturally, the brothers hesitated when I asked for an interview about their bond with Liu, to be published around the Nobel Prize ceremony.

“There’s a reason we’re sitting here and still alive. The feeling of fear is stronger than the desire for expression,” Gao Qiang said. A good quote, I encouraged him.

They were warm, down-to-earth men, free of the pretentiousness I often encountered among their peers, and generous in explaining how one makes free art in an unfree system. Still, writing the interview was difficult, because I kept worrying about the risks I might expose them to. I softened one passage after another.

When I realized I was protecting the brothers against their own carefully considered words, I rewrote the entire piece — yet even in the final version my sympathy seeped through.

Without realizing it, the friendship had taken hold.

Perhaps at the first embrace, or when they confided in me and showed where they had hidden their disassembled, weeping Mao. Or later, over a stir-fry with bacon, trading wordplay back and forth.
Gao Zhen’s infectious bravado and booming laughter, the sharp remarks of the much quieter Gao Qiang — I spoke freely with them, whereas I usually keep my cards close to my chest around Chinese acquaintances. This friendship became a bright spot in my life, even though it meant I could no longer write about the Gao Brothers, not even if the Chinese art scene were to make global headlines.

Arrested Art Brother

Letter from Gao Zhen to Ai Weiwei, August 16, 2025:

“I remember the journalists who came to interview us after your arrest. They all asked the same question: ‘Ai Weiwei and the Gao Brothers are internationally known artists who receive a lot of attention in our media. In our view, the work of the Gao Brothers is more dangerous than Ai’s. Why was he arrested, and you were not?’”

After months of increasingly grim confrontations with the authorities over the demolition of his studio, biting social-media commentary, and provocative nude photography, Ai Weiwei — the internationally renowned star of modern Chinese art — was arrested at Beijing airport on April 3, 2011. The blow hit the Gao Brothers hard.
Unlike Ai, a master of publicity, the brothers are shy in public. Ai comes from the artistic elite as the son of a beloved poet; the Gaos, with their working-class father, come from a different world. Abroad they are often mentioned in the same breath; in Beijing they rarely crossed paths.

Still, the brothers felt compelled to support their arrested art brother. The many interviews with foreign journalists were exhausting, they told me on the first spring day warm enough for a beer.

“They’re such short conversations — we’re afraid foreigners don’t really understand us.”

Again and again my friends had to explain to my colleagues why they were still free, and after the reporters left they would brood over it. Fear crept ever deeper into their hearts.

Words to Avoid

Post by the Gao Brothers on Sina Weibo, April 2011:

“Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you keep quiet?”
“Because I’m even more afraid of myself if I no longer dare to speak the truth.”

The Gao Brothers were addicted to Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Their days revolved around posting; every message was polished as carefully as their sculptures. When their account was blocked — which happened regularly — they were at a loss. They would pass the time guessing which word had triggered the censor. Once the account was restored minus the offending post, they knew which words to avoid in the future.

Post on Sina Weibo, early May 2011:

“Now that friends greet me with ‘is everything okay?’ these days, the phrase ‘take care’ feels especially heartwarming. Be careful with your thoughts, your words, your tweeting, your art. Be careful on the street too — be careful when you walk across the square…”

The square in question is Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese democracy movement ended in bloodshed in 1989. Every spring, June 4 casts its shadow ahead. The brothers then begin pondering how to commemorate the destruction of their generation’s democratic idealism despite the official taboo.

“Can’t you just skip a year?” I ask when they keep agonizing over the combination of two hypersensitive subjects: Ai Weiwei’s detention and “1989.” My suggestion lands badly. They will commemorate regardless — but how convenient it would be to be outside China around that loaded date.

At the end of May, one of my employers, the VPRO broadcaster, needs Chinese speakers for its 85th anniversary celebration at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. I discreetly arrange the trip, including an emergency plan and a film about their work. If they are not allowed to leave China, I will show the film at the festival and explain why my friends are absent.

The night before departure I sleep in their studio, on a camp bed between a pink Miss Mao and two bunches of leeks. The stench makes me vomit. My stomach only settles once I’m on the KLM plane.

Just before takeoff, the brothers post on Weibo that their next message will come from a Dutch free-thinkers’ festival.

Upon arrival at Schiphol, their account has vanished — not blocked, but deleted, along with all eight thousand followers. “Without our Weibo account, no one in China can follow the VPRO festival,” they say. No matter how many selfies we take in Amsterdam, they remain despondent.

Shards

Letter from Gao Zhen to Ai Weiwei, August 16, 2025:

“I knew for years that I was on my way to prison. Fortunately, I only reached that destination on August 26 last year — but that ‘fortune’ has an unfortunate side. Compared to ten years ago, at the time of your arrest, the world and China are now in their ‘darkest hour.’ Back then, international politicians readily spoke out about human rights, and modern Chinese art was in the global spotlight. That made the attention surrounding your 81-day ordeal spectacular.

“Those circumstances no longer exist. I have now been detained for a year. Although some foreign media still report on it, it is a pantomime compared to the uproar around your experience.”

On May 27, 2011, we meet the VPRO for a briefing. The brothers have designed a performance involving a billboard-sized painted glass panel, attacked with brooms, water, and a glass hammer. The VPRO worries about safety — will shards hit the audience?

In turn, the brothers and I worry about interaction with the audience, which will surely have engaged — and therefore dangerous — questions ready. It is bitterly ironic that at a festival celebrating free speech we opt for careful staging that stops just short of self-censorship. But the deletion of an entire Weibo account is a clear reminder not to forget the Chinese reality. We will be even more careful — with glass hammers and with words.

“Is there a chance you won’t be able to return to China after this performance?” The first audience question hits home. I translate; Gao Zhen sticks to the script:

“We are participating in a cultural activity, not a political demonstration, so I want to believe we can safely return home.”

They dodge questions about Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei by talking about their deleted Weibo account, hoping the perceptive listener understands how sensitive their very presence at the festival is.

The performance is a resounding success. The glass falls neatly onto the stage, revealing the final image: a photo of Gao Zhen on Tiananmen Square, with the text “Big Brother Is Watching You”.

After this unambiguous commemoration of “1989,” the brothers have no desire to attend the VPRO after-party. They want to get back to their laptops, endlessly trying to reach their old followers via a new Weibo account. They call it reincarnation. Almost their entire stay in Amsterdam is consumed by it. With difficulty I manage to get them onto a canal boat for an hour.

The return trip to China goes smoothly — at least that.

The Darkest Hour

Letter from Gao Zhen to Ai Weiwei, August 16, 2025:

“My lawyers (…) are preparing a plea for acquittal. They advise that several prominent artists and influential critics issue statements from within their fields.

“Because you are one of the most influential artists in the world, I am turning to you in this letter. (…) If possible, I hope you will use your influence to involve a number of international masters as well. (…) Whatever you decide: at the moment I write this letter to you, I feel free, and for that I am grateful.”

After a break from social media, Facebook’s algorithms decided I had no interest in the Gao Brothers. As a result, I miss a letter Gao Zhen wrote from his cell in August. I only stumble upon it weeks later, after stubbornly clicking on everything related to Chinese art until my timeline overflows with Gao Brothers content.
While fact-checking the letter, I share my sorrow with insiders about its contents: the noise in the cell from a blaring television and chattering fellow inmates, and the sober realization that the world has changed so much that only a powerless few still lie awake over a Chinese artist wasting away in detention. The hope against all odds, the endless waiting for trial — everything in those four handwritten pages hurts.

Ai posted the letter on all his social-media channels without comment, amid his steady stream of posts about Gaza, Ukraine, disputes with German media, and ongoing art projects. Even on the X account of the world’s most famous Chinese artist, the post about Gao Zhen did not go viral.

When Ai Weiwei was detained in 2011, the Chinese state was the favorite punching bag of freedom-loving thinkers, who saw China as a blank slate that, with Western influence and criticism, might come to resemble our social democracies.

Today that illusion is rightly seen as naïve. China is no longer the authoritarian exception that proves the democratic rule. Across the globe, tyranny and lawlessness are on the rise, and the misery accompanying them is so numbing that human-rights abuses in China no longer seem like the world’s worst suffering. Gao Zhen does not write about the “darkest hour” for nothing.

According to The New York Times and the Spanish newspaper El País, he is paying the price for it. Whereas Gao Zhen initially corresponded with his wife from prison — creating fragile artworks from torn letter paper about cherished moments with his young son — nothing now emerges from the jail. Even the comfort of a pen and a scrap of paper has been taken away.

[Note: See:

• Gao Zhen, Artist Who Critiqued the Cultural Revolution, Is Detained in China, The New York Times, 2 September 2024; and,
• Gao Zhen, Detained Chinese Artist, Keeps Creating From Prison, The New York Times, 8 December 2025.]

I was always told that a correspondent in a distant and difficult country leads a lonely life. I never believed that — as a journalist, I was constantly among people. While I tried to maintain personal distance from almost everyone I wrote about, I simultaneously crawled under the skin of my subjects to grasp their knowledge, experiences, and emotions for the larger story about China. And once that story was told, the interviewees disappeared into the human maelstrom of 1.4 billion other Chinese with compelling lives to write about.

That restless life would surely have become lonely without friends like the Gao Brothers. Comforting and tragic at the same time, that one rare friendship I allowed myself has now nevertheless become a story — one that casts a small light on Gao Zhen’s sorrowful fate.

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Source:

• Marije Vlaskamp, Gao Brothers, China Thought Express, 19 February 2026. Links and Chinese characters have been added by China Heritage — GRB

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