Chinese artist Weiwei honours pro-migrant New York
Mr Ai Weiwei’s most ambitious outdoor project to date,
He has worked his way through refugee camps, capturing the stories of migrants across the world. Now a celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has brought the fruits of his labour to New York, scattering over 300 works across the metropolis.
Mr Weiwei’s most ambitious outdoor project to date, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” — which takes its name from a line in a poem by Robert Frost, formally opened Thursday and will run until mid-February.
It’s a love letter of sorts to a city the artist, 60, called home from 1983 to 1993, and a new illustration of his empathy for refugees worldwide — stemming from his own experience of being exiled after his father, a poet, was branded an enemy of the Chinese state.
“I need to pay back my love to the city,” Mr Ai Weiwei insisted at a press conference in Central Park, honoring “a city (where) every young artist wants to be,” where “you never feel you are a foreigner.”
But the location of one of his large-scale works — a “Gilded Cage” installed at the southeast entrance of Central Park is by no means a coincidence. Visible from the heights of Trump Tower, where US President Donald Trump famously lived in a gold apartment, Mr Ai Weiwei said that he had “made it gold to please” the US president, of whom he is a staunch critic.
“The travel ban, the wall to be built between the US and Mexico which is unthinkable policy,” the artist, who now lives between Berlin and Beijing, said. “We are living at a time when there is no tolerance, divided — they are trying to separate us by colour, race, religion nationality...” Mr Ai Weiwei’s citywide exhibition is a gesture welcomed by New York, something of a sanctuary in the midst of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda. “New York City is the perfect canvas for Ai Weiwei's work,” New York’s Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement, adding his pieces “challenge us and can bring about social progress.”
The project — organised by the New York-based Public Art Fund, “draws attention to the unprecedented divisions in our political system and confronts xenophobia,” his wife, Chirlane McCray, added.
Mr Ai Weiwei’s works, intertwined with the existing urban landscape, can be found not only in Manhattan, but also in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.
They range from monumental structures to 200 unique banners attachedto lampposts in all five boroughs, and images of refugees displayed in spaces usually reserved for advertising.
Another cage, this time silver, arched, and reaching heights of some 40 feet, is located under the arch of Washington Square Park, a place with personal ties to Mr Ai Weiwei’s time living in New York.
Like the golden cage, which you can enter, a mirrored passage running underneath the arch represents an interactive element foundin each of the exhibition's cages and gratings — all re-imaginingsof the ominous security fence.
As for China and its government, Mr Ai Weiwei, whose passport was seized until 2015, no longer seems to prioritise in trying to target them. “More and more I realize that human rights is general, not only in China but everywhere,” Mr Ai Weiwei said.
“We always have to see humanity as one... We are all connected.” — AFP