Friends say that Chen Guang never thought his most recent performance would cause him trouble. He had invited around a dozen people to an unused studio, whose walls he had painted with years beginning with 1989 — his Year Zero — to 2014. The work began in the dark. Then a 4-year-old girl, dressed in white, shone a flashlight across the walls, illuminating the dates. When the lights came up, Chen Guang — his mouth muzzled with a mask — whitewashed the walls, echoing the way in which he saw China's Communist Party wipe clean its own history.
Now he's in police detention. No one even knows what crime he's accused of committing, apart from challenging the unspoken orders with his act of remembering an event that is supposed to be forgotten.