Analysis

China Is Stamping Out Dissident Art

Curators, painters, and performers are facing jail or exile. October 31, 2025, 2:00 PM Comment icon View Comments ( )

Two men pose in front of a brown sculpture of a headless Mao Zedong kneeling with one hand over his heart. The man on the left holds the sculpted severed head of Mao. The man on the right leans against the statue’s base and smokes a cigarette.

A Bangkok museum curator recently fled to London after Chinese and Thai officials pressured him to remove the names of Hong Kong, Uyghur, and Tibetan artists from an exhibition. Among them were artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yee Man, who had created an installation about espionage and whose name have been removed from the show, which was critical of authoritarian govern

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