A French citizen and her husband have been held incommunicado for a week after the couple traveled to southern China to paint a tribute to late Chinese democracy activist and dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), friends and witnesses said yesterday.
Marine Brossard and Hu Jiamin (胡嘉岷) on Friday last week painted a mural at the entrance of a public exhibition in Shenzhen, China, but city authorities covered the wall with a banner the same evening, witnesses told reporters.
Tributes to Liu are censored in China.
Brossard is a French national, but Hu’s nationality is unclear, a friend who has known them for more than five years said.
Reporters tried to call Hu several times this week, but an automated message said his cellphone was switched off.
SYMBOLIC TRIBUTE
The couple had traveled from their home in Lyon, France, to participate in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, witnesses who spoke with the couple in Shenzhen told reporters.
“We have been trying to reach them, but we haven’t been able to confirm anything,” said the friend of the couple, who asked for anonymity due to safety concerns.
Their painting depicted an empty blue chair inside a room with red bars, an apparent reference to Liu, who was in prison when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
An empty chair stood symbolically in his place at the ceremony, which infuriated the Chinese Communist Party.
Liu died from liver cancer in July, making China the first country since Nazi Germany to allow a Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody.
DISAPPEARANCE
Chinese poet Wu Wei (吳偉), who goes by the pen name Ye Du (野渡) and went to Shenzhen to see the exhibition, said he spoke briefly with Hu after seeing the tribute.
“I was shocked to see it. I never imagined that I would see a public commemoration of Liu in China,” Ye told reporters.
Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that its reporter had seen the couple shouting while being taken away from their covered-up mural by plainclothes men after 7pm on Friday.
The Shenzhen public security bureau said it did not have information on the couple.
The French embassy in Beijing declined to comment.
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