The pressure from Chinese officials in Thailand follows the arrest in January of Christian musician and performance artist Fei Xiaosheng, a resident of eastern Beijing’s Songzhuang art district. Fei’s friends believe authorities targeted him due to his public solidarity with the Hong Kong democracy movement. For decades, Fei had used symbolism in his installations to criticize the CCP, including, in a 2011 photography exhibit, the display of a blank wall in homage to then-detained artist Ai Weiwei. Before President Xi Jinping assumed power, artists like Fei tested the boundaries of political expression, leading to a boom in China’s contemporary art scene. But the space for artistic independence is narrowing fast as authorities try to use art to enforce a positive image of the CCP’s past.

A Bangkok museum curator recently fled to London after Chinese and Thai officials pressured him to remove the names of Hong Kong, Uyghur, and Tibetan artists from an exhibition. Among them were artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yee Man, who had created an installation about espionage and whose name have been removed from the show, which was critical of authoritarian governments. The pressures was just one example of a growing campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to wipe out dissident artists and to ensure that only government-approved messages appear in galleries—both inside and outside China’s borders.

A Bangkok museum curator recently fled to London after Chinese and Thai officials pressured him to remove the names of Hong Kong, Uyghur, and Tibetan artists from an exhibition.