Photos from the time I spent with Zhao Yaliang, wife of detained artist Gao Zhen, and their son, documenting their daily life.

Gao Zhen is part of a generation of avant-garde Chinese artists who rose to international fame in the early 2000s. Although he and his family emigrated to the United States in 2022, he was arrested in August 2024 when he returned to China for a visit. He has been accused of violating a law against slandering the country’s “heroes and martyrs” because of some provocative sculptures of Mao Zedong that he created more than 15 years ago, long before the law even existed. He is now detained and awaiting trial, while in jail he used to send his wife hand-torn pictures made from sheets of letter paper. She has about 80 of these, mostly depicting their family of three, but they stopped arriving in August this year.

Yaliang showed me a poem that her husband had written for her:

“The waning moon shines at midnight,
the moment I wake from a dream of longing.
The pain of our parting has yet to heal.
Tears fall lamenting the late return.”

When I asked her about its meaning she burst into tears – tears she quickly wiped away. I saw a stark contrast between her life alone, when her son is at school and the longing for her husband hits hardest, and the moments when she is with her son: busy being a mother, cooking, playing, taking him to school. It all looked like a perfectly ordinary life, if not for the sad limbo in which it is suspended.