At a museum in Brescia, northern Italy, Shanghai-born artist Badiucao is making final adjustments to an exhibition that has enraged Chinese officials.

Images of President Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh -- a tongue-in-cheek comparison now widely censored on Chinese social media -- hang alongside a tribute to Wuhan whistleblower Li Wenliang and a depiction of riot police pursuing a protestor. Mock posters for the forthcoming Winter Olympics show a snowboarder sliding across a CCTV camera and a biathlete pointing a rifle towards a blindfolded Uighur prisoner, CNN reported.

The way Chinese regime is behaving is very ominous.
Badiucao's provocative new works will be unveiled to the public on Saturday, despite protests from Chinese diplomats. In a letter to Brescia's mayor, the country's embassy in Rome said the artworks are "full of anti-Chinese lies," and that they "distort the facts, spread false information, mislead the understanding of the Italian people and seriously injure the feelings of the Chinese people," according to local newspaper Giornale di Brescia.
For the dissident artist, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Australia since 2009, the spat comes as little surprise.

"It's almost impossible (to) avoid offending the Chinese government these days," he says, showing CNN around the exhibition ahead of its opening. "Anything could be sensitive; anything could be problematic."

Since the embassy lodged its complaint last month, museum officials and local politicians have framed the show -- titled "La Cina (non) è Vicina," or "China is (not) near" -- as a symbol of free speech.

"I have to say, I had to read the letter twice because it surprised me," Brescia's deputy mayor, Laura Castelletti, recounts, calling it "an intrusion on a city's artistic, cultural decision." The request to cancel the show, she adds, has only "attracted more attention."

The Brescia Museum Foundation's president, Francesca Bazoli, meanwhile says that going ahead with the exhibition "was a matter of freedom of artistic expression."

The Chinese embassy in Rome has not responded to CNN's repeated requests for comment.