A fire broke out Monday at a sculpture park in California’s Mojave desert that’s run by Chinese-American dissident artist Chen Weiming, destroying studios, documents and residential structures – the second time in three years that a fire has engulfed the park.
The Liberty Sculpture Park, which opened in 2017, displays a host of outdoor pieces of art that are generally critical of the Chinese government, including a life-size sculpture of the “tank man” facing off against a tank, commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Chen said he raced to the park on Monday night after receiving a call from volunteers and arrived to find thick clouds of smoke and fire. The local fire department dispatched as many as eight fire trucks to extinguish the blaze.
The county sheriff and fire department told RFA they are investigating the fire. Authorities have yet to comment on the cause of the blaze.
Chen and other park volunteers say they have reason to believe it was a case of arson perpetrated by agents of China’s Communist Party.
The first fire, which occurred in July that year, destroyed a sculpture critical of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, titled “CCP Virus Statue,” and the U.S. Justice Department later accused three men with ties to Beijing of starting it.
Yan Na, one of the artists and volunteers at the park, told RFA she believes that agents of the Chinese government are responsible for the fire.
“It was very targeted this time, burning documentation, computers, and photography equipment,” said the former art teacher from southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. “The fire involved the kind of black smoke that is produced by using gasoline … and based on this assumption, I think it was man-made.”
Yan said that the sculpture park was likely targeted because it uses art to highlight rights abuses by China’s government.
"They may [want to] achieve a kind of deterrence because … they burned our work area, so if someone was inside, their life would have been at risk,” she said.
A spokesman from the Chinese Embassy said he wasn't aware of the case and had no comment.
‘Afraid of the truth’
Chen agreed that Beijing was likely to blame, noting the arrests pertaining to the earlier fire and that the park has been subjected to several acts of vandalism.
“What the Communist Party is afraid of is the truth, because the sculpture park uses artistic expression to inform the general public in the United States about the party’s evils,” he said. “Because of our perseverance and the support of our volunteers, we are becoming better known … so they carry out all kinds of despicable actions."
Chen said that he knows his work is having the desired effect because of the frequent attacks, and said he hopes incidents like Monday’s fire cause U.S. authorities to pay more attention to cases of Chinese state-sponsored espionage.
Chen launched the park in 2017 along Interstate 15 in Yermo, California, located 230 km (145 miles) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. It also includes a huge sculpture of “64” to remember victims of the June 4, 1989, massacre in Tiananmen – a number that is still censored by China.
Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.