Shanghai-based artist Dai Jianyong has been arrested by Chinese authorities for posting humorous photomontages of president Xi Jinping on social media, the Independent reports, and faces up to five years in jail.
Depicting the President with a large moustache and scrunching up his face, Dai called the picture Chrysanthemum Face — the flower is a slang word for ‘anus’ in Chinese.
This arrest falls in line with Xi Jinping’s strict approach to ‘dissident art’, which he set out in his speech last October, saying that art should ‘embody socialist core values in a lively and vivid way’, and ‘rally Chinese strength’.
1 June 2015.
