Painting Denied By Chinese Customs

“Birds Nest, in the Style of Cubism,” a painting by Zhang Hongtu, … was supposed to be in Beijing during the Olympic Games, in the exhibition “Go Game, Beijing!” organized by a Berlin marketing firm and displayed at the German Embassy. But it was seized by Customs on arrival and denied entry as “unacceptable” for its color, its depiction of the stadium, and its inscriptions.

The ashen-brown picture shows the gleaming new Olympic stadium, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, as Piranesi might have imagined it and Picasso painted it — as a decaying ruin rendered in fragmented angled forms. On the canvas, cubist-style, are inscriptions in English letters and Chinese characters: “Tibet,” “human right” and the Olympic motto, “one world, one dream.”

The WSJ has the full story here.