When Xiaoda Xiao was twenty years old, he was sent to a forced labor prison in his native China for defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao. He spent seven years working in a stone quarry as a part of a labor reform brigade. In November, Two Dollar Radio will release Xiao’s book The Visiting Suit: Stories From My Prison Life. Xiao completed these paintings to accompany the book’s release.
See the rest of Xiao’s paintings at Two Dollar Radio’s blog.
Read an excerpt from The Visiting Suit: Stories From My Prison Life published in a recent issue of Guernica Magazine here.