A lawyer from Florida has pleaded guilty to bombing a satirical statue of the Communist leaders Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong in Texas in 2022 and attempting to bomb the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, in September 2023.
According to an announcement by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, in early November 2022 Christopher Rodriguez of Panama City, Florida, drove around 850 miles to San Antonio, Texas, in a rental car. In the early hours of 7 November, he climbed over a fence to gain access to a courtyard where Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head (2009)—a 21ft-tall, 4,400lb chromed statue by the Chinese artist duo the Gao Brothers (Gao Qiang and Gao Zhen)—had been installed. He set two canisters of explosives at the base of the sculpture and shot them with a rifle, causing a large explosion that significantly damaged the sculpture.
Less than a year later, Rodriguez drove around 930 miles from his hometown to northern Virginia with a rifle and 15lbs of explosives. In the early morning hours of 24 September 2023, he took a taxi to near the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, placed a bag filled with explosives near a rear wall of the building and attempted to detonate it with his rifle. He missed three times, and the explosives, which failed to detonate, were later recovered by police.
Rodriguez was arrested by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on 4 November 2023 in Louisiana and has been held since then. On Friday (2 August), he pleaded guilty to damaging property occupied by a foreign government, explosive materials—malicious damage to federal property and receipt or possession of an unregistered firearm (destructive device).
One of the Gao Brothers’ best-known works, Miss Mao debuted at the 2009 Vancouver Biennale. In the piece, the Chinese dissident artists depicted a diminutive, feminised rendering of the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong balancing atop a giant portrait bust of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. According to an educational text about their work produced for the Vancouver Biennale, the Gao Brothers have been “blacklisted in China” due to the critical and satirical content of their work, which “has never been publicly displayed in China”.
Miss Mao was brought to central San Antonio by the local real-estate developer and art collector James Lifshutz, who also owns the Blue Star Arts Complex, one of the city’s contemporary-art hubs. The sculpture was unveiled less than a month after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
“There currently seems to be a balancing act going on amid this war of aggression, what China’s stance on it is, what role they play or don’t play,” Lifshutz told the San Antonio Report at the time. “Poignantly, there seems to be a new or different meaning than the artists originally had.” He added: “It’s monumental and shiny, and I like it.”
Despite its fairly overt tone of satire and critique, at the time of its unveiling some people misinterpreted Miss Mao as being pro-communist.
In an email to the San Antonio Report at the time of the work’s Texan debut, the Gao Brothers said: “We hope that this sculpture we created more than ten years ago will provide a visual context across history and reality for people to think about Putin’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. It is our pleasure and honour to display our work in the great city of San Antonio, and we hope freedom-loving Texas people will enjoy the sculpture.”
The duo apparently did not anticipate the response—and likely misinterpretation—of one freedom-loving Florida person.