Censored Chinese artist's photos come to NYC

Photographs taken by the wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, whose work is censored in her native China, will go on display at Columbia University.

Liu Xia's photos -- 25 of them -- were spirited out of China just before she was placed under house arrest after her husband was awarded the Nobel Prize. He was jailed in 2009 for 11 years for urging democratic reforms in China.

But Liu's photographs are not about her husband, said Guy Sorman, a friend of the couple and curator of an exhibition of her works opening at Columbia University Thursday night.

"This is not about politics first. It's about art first. Her husband is his own story. . . . She is a major Chinese artist who happens to be the wife of Liu Xiaobo," Sorman said in a phone interview from Paris.

The photographer uses lifelike dolls as metaphors for the pain and suffering of the Chinese people.

When Sorman last saw Liu in September 2010, she gave her consent to have the pictures shown in Europe and the United States. But to avoid suspicion, a network of her friends helped get them out of the country "one by one," he said. "It was a long process."

A museum outside of Paris exhibited them in the fall.

"The Silent Strength of Liu Xia" at Columbia runs through March 1 and is the only planned U.S. show. Afterward, it will travel to Madrid and Hong Kong.

Sorman discovered the photos by accident while visiting the couple's Beijing home. He immediately began convincing the "very, very shy" Liu, who is in her 50s, to let him exhibit them.

Because of her home confinement, she is unaware of the New York exhibition.

In her country, Liu is better known for her poetry, published in the 1980s. "Then she disappeared. She decided to vanish behind her husband and started painting and photographing -- but for herself," Sorman said.

The black and white photos -- most measuring 3 feet by 3 feet -- are taken with an old-fashioned camera and printed with limited technical resources. The "ugly babies" pictures, as she calls them, represent the Chinese people and their facial "expressions reflect their pain," said Sorman, a columnist and author in economics and philosophy.

The dolls, which a visitor from Brazil gave Liu two decades ago, are arranged in a series of sets designed by Liu in her apartment.

Her husband holds up a doll with an anguished face in one image. A tied-up doll sits in front of an open book in another. Another doll, shown under a pile of books, "represents the weight of the old Chinese civilization" and the country's crackdown on artists and activists, Sorman said.

"She gives you a measure of how difficult life is in China, especially for artists and intellectuals," Sorman said.