It happened a long time ago, so we may have forgotten. The United States was initially cool towards France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of friendship between the two countries. In time, of course, “Miss Liberty” would become one of the icons of the American dream, the veritable symbol of that country of “all possibilities”, including free speech. Today, 125 years later, would China accept the gift of a Statue of Liberty after it destroyed the Tiananmen Statue of Democracy? A Chinese artist, newly released from prison, has offered his country two. As Brice Pedroletti reports from Beijing…

At the foot of a public housing building in the northern suburbs of Beijing, a sign announces the “Garden of Steel Roses”. To enter, you must squeeze between the fence and the wall of the building to reach a small space in front of a flat on the ground floor. Two giant busts stand on their bases. The first is of Lin Zhao. In the late 1950s, Lin protested in writing against the abuses of the anti-rights campaign, submitting a petition to the Great Helmsman himself in support of Peng Dehuai. (Peng, a plain-spoken Marshall of the People’s Liberation Army, had been imprisoned for criticizing the Great Leap Forward.) Lin Zhao’s protest earned the young woman a 20-year prison sentence in October 1960. On April 29, 1968, at the age 36, she was executed and her body was never found. The second bust is that of another young woman, Zhang Zhixin, executed in 1975 at the age of 40, another denouncer of Maoism. Both fervent Communists, the two women persisted in their criticism of Mao from their prison cells and to their last moments.
The painter Yan Zhengxue, 66, created this strange sculpture garden upon his own release from prison in late 2009. He sculpted, in his tiny apartment and in secret, these two statues of liberty based on photographs and testimonials from people who had known the women. The work was both therapy and tribute, Yan Zhengxue says. “I told myself that I was lucky to have survived. They were not,” he explains, sitting in his small living room, the walls covered with paintings in black ink. In 2006, Yan Zhengxue was sentenced to three years in prison for subversion. His crime: helping peasants of his native region, Zhejiang, near Taizhou, defend their land rights. It was not the first time that Yan had been locked up. To be exact, it was the 13th. In 1995, he had been sentenced to three years in a re-education camp for launching a lawsuit against Public Safety, which he turned into “performance art”. At the time, Yan Zhengxue was head of Yuanmingyuan Village, Beijing’s first artists’ community, which the authorities wanted to evacuate. The case caused an uproar in the Chinese media with cultural and artistic figures signing petitions in his support. Deported to the far north, Yan was tortured with electric prods by prison guards and seriously injured.

When he was arrested again in 2006, he warned the police that he would rather commit suicide than return to prison. Suicide would be “my final art performance,” he said, but the provincial authorities were unmoved. From his cell, Yan Zhengxue began writing the story of his life. A cell mate, a common criminal, helped smuggle out the manuscripts, tiny rolls of paper inserted into soap. “At the time, I thought that both the actions I had taken to defend human rights throughout my life and my artistic activity had come to an end. The curtain had fallen. The democracy movement in China was being torn apart by its differences. It was the war between the ‘sheep’ - moderates who advocated cooperation with the authoritiesand the ‘goats’ - advocates of a more active defence of rights, like the lawyer Gao Zhisheng, and the activists Guo Feixiong and Hu Jia (all imprisoned for their commitment to defending human rights). I considered myself as part of the ‘goat’ camp.”

Having completed his autobiography, “The (Art) Performance is Over”, Yan tried to put his suicide plan into action but failed. In any case, “Given my condition, doctors said that I had three months to live,” he says. The book manages to make its way to Hong Kong and is published by Sibixiang Editions. Upon Yan’s release in 2009, his publisher encourages him to do a project on Lin Zhao. Yan Zhengxue begins work on the sculptures of the two women who were less fortunate than himself. The creation of the statues is phantasmagoric. In January 2010, the convalescent painter goes to work in a small room of his apartment in Beijing. When the police make their rounds, Yan’s wife, also an artist, does calligraphy in the doorway to the room. “They suspected that I was creating something, but they didn’t know what or where,” says Yan Zhengxue. “They never imagined that such large statues could be hidden in a small room.” The moulds are taken in secret to a foundry in Hebei. The statues are set in Yan’s garden, as the district authorities forbid their transport for exhibition. The authorities regularly ask Yann to put the statues inside his apartment, but he holds firm. “I said that my apartment was too small. Then they asked me to put bed-sheets over them. I said that it would be disrespectful. Then they demanded clear plastic. I had to accept,” he says. On April 29, the anniversary of the death of Lin Zhao, visitors, on hand to honour her, tear off the plastic covers. 

Since then, many people regularly visit the Garden of Steel Roses, including activists and figures of the pro-democracy movement. Given the heightened surveillance in this season of the Nobel Prize ceremony, the commemoration of Lin Zhao’s birthday on December 12 was scheduled for three days earlier. But Yan Zhengxue is picked up at dawn by agents, and carried around all day in their car. His dozen guests are not worried. For Lin Zhao has become an icon of the democracy movement, saved from the dustbin of history by the director Hu Jie’s 2004 documentary film, “Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul” wherein were revealed the secret letters, written in Lin’s own blood, to the man she loved. 

The case of Zhang Zhixin, another executed young woman, has been made part of official propaganda. The Chinese government has “turned her into a martyr: through her example we repudiate the Cultural Revolution and non-Maoism” writes the historian Youqin Wang, a specialist in the Cultural Revolution at the University of Chicago. Yan Zhengxue’s project to donate the two statues of the young women to their alma maters, Peking University and Renmin University, is blocked, despite broad support within the two prestigious institutions. For the artist, the ghost of Maoism acts like a black sun. “The black sun absorbs the light. That’s what prevents the Chinese from getting democracy,” he says. A black sun sculpture hangs on the wall next to the statues. Yan also puts black suns in his paintings.

 In 1965, while still an art student, Yan Zhengxue, quickly perceived the darkening atmosphere as the Cultural Revolution began. “We only had the right to paint cadavers,” he recalls. “Posing models was denounced as bourgeois.” The young man took to his heels, wandering to the far reaches of western China. He found himself in Xinjiang, in a collective farm where he began painting nature and animals. Noticing Yan’s talent, the director of the farm asks him to make a few portraits of Mao. As a reward, the painter is allowed to bring out his girlfriend and marry her. But the Cultural Revolution soon arrives as well. In 1968, the couple is in Lanzhou, in nearby Gansu. Yan receives the order to paint an eight-meter-tall portrait of Mao on the facade of the city’s civil aviation office. City managers have fled to this office, trying to escape the harassment of the Red Guards

Some of them criticize the profile of the great leader that Yan Zhengxue, perched on his scaffold, has begun to paint. An argument breaks out. The painter explains that he cannot start over, as he would have to cover Mao’s face with white paint. At this point, one of the Guards notices a cross that Yan has drawn on his drawing as a guide for reproducing it to scale. Yan Zhengxue is accused of being contra-revolutionary and arrested. He thinks it is a joke, but the flood of prisoners suggests otherwise. A peasant who carried a bust of Mao on a yoke. A Hong Kong man accused of homosexuality. A child who made a paper bird from a picture of Mao. Yan and the child escape summary execution. The interrogating officer confirms Yan’s story and orders his release. The artist later learns that a five-percent quota of executions had been set for the city. In this same year, 1965, Lin Zhao, who is languishing in a prison in Shanghai, is killed by a bullet in the head.

© 2010 le Monde. This report was re-edited by the author for The Global Journal