In a Pennsylvania studio, Chinese-American artist Sarah Lin Lu is assembling an unusual documentary record: oil paintings paired with oral testimony from members of China’s unregistered house churches who have faced surveillance, detention, and exile for their faith.
Lu, born in Chengdu and fatherless at age five, calls her approach “witness in color.” Her Red Leather Suitcase project combines what she describes as “visual diary” paintings created from memory, silence, and prayer with carefully edited testimonies from Chinese house-church believers. The work has produced two full-color books that document three specific faith communities that have endured China’s intensifying religious crackdown.
At the center of Lu’s paintings appears one recurring image: a red leather suitcase. The object becomes a visual anchor for identity carried through displacement, representing passports, visas, departure, return, and the fundamental question of belonging. Her imagery extends to jars, trains, bridges, and moons, rendered with deliberate tenderness rather than sensationalism. Lu often writes dates and place names directly into her compositions, anchoring each work as something closer to archive than illustration.
One of the most internationally recognized cases Lu documents is the Chengdu-based Early Rain Covenant Church. On December 9, 2018, authorities detained Pastor Wang Yi along with dozens of congregants in what U.S. officials later described as a massive crackdown on Chengdu’s largest underground church. In late 2019, Wang was tried behind closed doors and sentenced to nine years in prison on charges including inciting subversion of state power and illegal business operation, charges that rights groups and international observers have repeatedly criticized as politically motivated.
For Lu, the Early Rain story represents more than a policy dispute over religious freedom. It becomes a series of specific lives—people worshiping under surveillance, preaching under threat, and trying to pastor under restrictions that reach deep into daily routine. Her paintings, paired with testimony, attempt to document not only the arrests and sentences but also the quieter costs: family separation, chronic uncertainty, and the emotional toll of living under constant pressure.
The project also documents Zion Church, a major unregistered congregation founded by Pastor Jin Mingri, also known as Ezra Jin. Zion had previously faced state pressure, including the closure of its main sanctuary in 2018 after refusing intrusive surveillance measures. In October 2025, authorities detained dozens of Zion Church leaders and staff in what became the harshest crackdown on an underground church since 2018. Jin was detained in Beihai, Guangxi, and leaders later faced charges described as illegally using information networks, in the context of tightening controls over unauthorized online preaching and religious activity.
U.S. officials responded publicly to the Zion detentions. The U.S. State Department issued a statement condemning the arrests, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom released a separate condemnation of the nationwide detentions. The U.S. Senate agreed to a resolution condemning the detention of Pastor Jin Mingri and other Zion Church leaders and reaffirming U.S. support for global religious freedom. Pastor Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, urged U.S. lawmakers to help secure her father’s release, describing the impact on families as the crackdown widened.
For Lu’s project, the Zion story underscores a modern reality: in the digital age, online worship and preaching can become targets rather than safe havens. The church space is no longer only a building but can be a livestream, a group chat, a shared document, or a network of small gatherings that still leaves a trace.
Sociologist Fenggang Yang of Purdue University, a longtime scholar of religion in China, has argued that many large urban house churches are no longer marginal gatherings. They increasingly include educated professionals and develop organizational capacity that makes them more publicly visible, and therefore more exposed to state pressure. As these churches expand across cities and use digital broadcasting to build influence beyond a single physical location, authorities can frame independent religious organizing as a governance challenge, intensifying official scrutiny.
The third community Lu documents consists of the Mayflower church families, house-church families who fled China and are now living in the United States. These believers undertook their own journeys of faith and displacement, carrying with them stories of surveillance, harassment, and the decision to leave home rather than abandon their religious convictions. Lu built direct relationships with these families and churches, earning their trust and affirmation for the care and accuracy of her work.
The books carry a foreword by Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, positioning the project within broader conversations about religious liberty on a global scale. This institutional endorsement has helped the work reach audiences beyond the art world, including American churches, religious freedom advocates, and human rights organizations.
Lu frames her English-language publishing and documentation as a form of safeguarding: if accounts are deleted, platforms are shut down, or histories are rewritten inside China, then a parallel record outside China, especially in English, can help preserve firsthand testimony for future readers, researchers, and faith communities. That intent shapes the project’s design. The paintings function as entry points, while the testimonies provide names, dates, locations, and lived context.
Lu won the 2020 Yage Prize for Christian Literature & Arts at Duke University, recognition that underscores her integration of visual art with literary testimony. Her background spans decades of work in art and publishing across both China and the United States, establishing credibility as both practitioner and documenter.
The story-driven art-and-book project serves multiple audiences simultaneously. Primary readers include American Christians seeking to understand and pray for persecuted believers abroad, members of the international religious freedom community working in policy and advocacy, and Christian counselors drawn to narratives of resilience and healing informed by trauma awareness.
The work also resonates with Chinese-American and immigrant communities exploring their own questions of identity and home, readers who prefer narrative nonfiction and oral history to opinion writing, and women’s faith audiences interested in stories of loss and rebuilding. Educational institutions including seminaries, Christian colleges, and university programs in religious studies, sociology, Asian studies, and human rights have acquired the books for their libraries and curricula.
Lu’s format, pairing documentary painting with written testimony, offers what advocates describe as a rare combination that creates lasting impressions. The visual elements help readers connect emotionally with human experiences while the text provides documentary clarity and context. The red suitcase itself becomes a visual language for displacement, a symbol readers can return to as they encounter individual stories of faith under pressure.
Lu’s approach reflects what she describes as trauma-informed, dignity-first storytelling. The work acknowledges suffering without exploiting it, protecting the humanity of those whose stories appear while still naming what faith has cost them. Her paintings do not dramatize persecution but instead honor ordinary believers and refugee families through attention to detail and visual witness.
The project positions itself as a bridge between the free church in America and the persecuted church in China, inviting informed prayer, practical support, and deeper unity across national borders. Rather than presenting distant suffering, the work creates accessibility for everyday church members, pastors, small groups, and mission organizations seeking to engage meaningfully with global Christian experience.
Select curators, galleries, and collectors have also taken interest in Lu’s contemporary narrative painting, particularly where it intersects memory, migration, and faith while paired with documentary storytelling. This crossover appeal extends the reach of the testimonies beyond traditional religious audiences into cultural spaces where stories of displacement and identity find receptive attention.
The Red Leather Suitcase project represents a woman-led, immigrant-led act of witness, turning personal wounds into meaning through image and word. Lu’s autobiographical approach merges with documentary purpose, creating work that is simultaneously personal memoir and collective testimony, art object and historical record. In a media environment where China’s religious repression is often reduced to breaking-news cycles, her witness in color is an attempt to slow the story down long enough for readers to see faces, remember details, and recognize that surveillance, prison, and exile are not abstractions but realities lived by families in the present tense.
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