CHINESE CULTURE:Artists Gao Qiang and Gao Zhen lost their father to China's Cultural Revolution, and their work is an attempt to get China to face up to its difficult past and the truth behind its most famous leader, Mao Zedong, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Beijing

GAO QIANG IS slightly out of breath when he arrives at the studio he shares with his older brother Zhen in Beijing’s trendy 798 art district. En route to the interview, China’s most controversial contemporary artists crashed their car, and Qiang had to stay behind to sort out the paperwork. The younger Gao apologises for being late, and then, almost casually, he takes Mao Zedong’s head out of a plastic bag and attaches it to the corpulent, kneeling body of modern China’s founding father.

The great helmsman’s trunk and head are made of bronze and this sculpture is called Mao’s Guilt. It is iconoclasm on a profound level, a shocking piece of work and a key artefact in the version of history that the Gao brothers tell about China. “China has so many stories that they are like a dream. Every story is true, but we try to tell them in a fictional way,” says Gao Zhen, the older brother.

Mao never atoned for what happened during his rule, as he always believed he was acting in China’s interests. His achievements in establishing the world’s newest superpower sit uneasily beside the horrific events of his reign: the millions who died of starvation during the failed agricultural experiment of the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, or the millions of lives destroyed in the exercise in political wilfulness known as the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

The piece is also startling because it is such a public criticism of the man whose Communist Party still runs China today. The Gao brothers’ father was killed in the Cultural Revolution, and much of what drives the work of Gao Zhen, who is 53, and Gao Qiang, 47, is anger at the events set in chain by the chairman.

Mao is officially considered “70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad” and he is on every bank note. The Gaos’ interest is in the “30 per cent bad”, and their work cries out that there is more to this era than the official version allows for. The eerie bronze image of Mao shows him in his declining years, his hand on his heart and his face creased with sorrow, as he appears to seek atonement. The Gaos’ work also confronts modern China and the changes wrought on society by socialism with Chinese characteristics, or capitalism, or whatever you want to call it.

The artists have had their studio raided by the police on numerous occasions, which is why they always keep Mao’s head and body in separate locations. In their work, Mao is deconstructed, sometimes into grotesque, balloonish shapes, such as the Miss Mao theme, which is like a nightmare by Jeff Koons, and part of a series of large sculptures that give Mao a pair of breasts and the nose of Richard Nixon, who opened diplomatic relations with China.

And yet some of the Mao work is incredibly simple, and reflects the fact that the artists are seeking something as simple as an apology for what happened to their family. During the Cultural Revolution, the crazed period of ideological frenzy in which hundreds of thousands died and millions of lives were destroyed, Qiang and Zhen’s father was labelled a class enemy and dragged away by the authorities. A month or so later, they were told he had committed suicide.

“He didn’t commit suicide, he was murdered. I have sympathy with the petitioners [people who attempt to resolve grievances with the government through official channels] that you see in our art because we were petitioners – my mother and her six children came to Beijing to get justice and to get protection. The authorities tried to expel us. After the Cultural Revolution, I became a petitioner for my father,” says Zhen.

It’s a very different representation of Mao than the one you see on the portrait outside the Forbidden City, or the one seen in the propaganda epic The Founding of a Republic, China’s most successful film ever, in which he is portrayed as an undiluted hero.

The Gao brothers are very different from their peers. Representations of Mao by contemporary Chinese artists have become cliches, so often do they appear, especially in 798. It was set up as a countercultural centre by artists in a former missile factory, and has rapidly graduated into a full-fledged member of the establishment. Where once penniless artists made art like their lives depended on it, now bus loads of Swiss tourists sweep through, buying up kitschy paintings that riff on Cultural Revolution themes, while Chinese rubbernecking visitors come to be scandalised by the nudity and vaguely risky political tone.

The Gaos are a million miles removed from these contemporary artists who cash in on the fetish for all things revolutionary. Their political manifestos sit uneasily with these kind of phenomena. Their art is angry, occasionally funny, vital and always confrontational, and at its best, the work can change the way you look at and think about China.

“Do you want to know the difference between us and the other contemporary artists? We want to show Mao as he really was and they just want to make money,” says Gao Zhen.

The brothers are still working in 798, but the management company that runs the complex must find their presence uncomfortable. In The Execution of Christ, a group of life-size Maos point bayoneted rifles at Christ. Some fellow Chinese artists have criticised the Gaos' work as too direct, but this is actually a subtle reference to Edouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian, which was itself a reference to Francisco Goya's Execution of the Rebels. While their work has an immediate impact, it is not superficial, and is informed by a deep sense of horror at what Chinese history has wrought on the family.

“During the Cultural Revolution I was a child, but I was deeply influenced by what happened, and our work shows many of the things which happened at that time,” says Gao Qiang. In the cafe that they use to show their work, he is toying with a top-end Canon camera in front of a lithograph-style print of Barack Obama.

It’s not all about Mao, and they do a lot of other great work, but it’s the work about the chairman, who died in 1976, that stands out. In one of the brothers’ most accomplished pieces, The Forever Unfinished Building No 4, there are images of migrant workers, prostitutes, dissidents, Kim Jong-il, police, Nazis, Porsches, Olympic stars, astronauts – basically all the components of the ongoing dialogue about China’s metamorphosis, executed in the style of Antoni Gaudí and Jeff Koons, with a splash of Jake and Dinos Chapman.

It even features Liu Xiaobo, a prominent Chinese dissident who was detained by police in December 2008 for his role in writing a manifesto of demands for more freedom, called Charter 08, which was signed by many Chinese artists and writers, including the Gaos.

“Our major influence is China’s current situation,” says Gao Zhen pointing at the petitioners. “We are always together and we talk about ideas. If we both agree, we do it. If one of us disagrees, then we drop it.”

Another striking series is based on news photographs of a raid on a brothel. One of the key pieces in this series, To Catch a Lady, was confiscated by police who broke into their studio, and only returned after the brothers filed a complaint. In another exhibition in 2006, government officials came in with a list of work that had to go.

During the National Day celebrations in October, to mark 60 years of the People’s Republic of China, the Gao brothers went downtown but could only get as far as Wangfujing, the central shopping precinct, which was deserted except for thousands of police.

“They were even in the toilet,” says Qiang, showing me photographs of urinating cops on his phone. “It’s ridiculous. This was not a party for the people.”

The brothers have been blacklisted since 1989, the year of the pro-democracy movement, but they did get passports in 2004. They take certain precautions, such as only doing interviews with foreign media, as domestic media exposure could lead to serious trouble. During the Olympics, the brothers had two guards outside their studio.

“Few have the honour of the government putting two guards on their house. Of course I’m worried about being arrested, but you need to make sacrifices to be a real person. If they start arresting me, then they really have problems. I’m just a little artist, and they have to deal with Xinjiang [a huge area in northwestern China riven with ethnic tensions], and Tibet, and migrant workers losing their jobs. If they start jailing people like me, the prisons will be full very soon,” says Qiang.

The Gaos are tiring of the Mao theme and will move on, but they are committed to the importance of the image seen in Mao’s Guilt. “We can’t avoid this image. If he knelt and confessed, like the way the Germans atoned for the Nazi era . . . we think our Mao thing is over now,” said Gao Zhen.

Qiang says the key to the kneeling Mao is symbolic: “It’s not him saying sorry, it’s a system saying sorry. It’s very important for China to reveal the bad things and to understand history and to step into the real world. A lot of people lost out on their lives during the time of chairman Mao.”

He takes the great helmsman’s head off his shoulders, and puts it back into the plastic bag, then the two brothers walk off into the night