Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Various locations, New York City, through Feb. 11 For anyone who spends more than a few days in New York City this fall, the art of Ai Weiwei will be “nearly impossible to miss,” said Katharine Schwab in FastCompany.com. The worldrenowned Chinese artist has put his mark on 300 public sites across the city, in a project designed to call attention to refugees worldwide and the rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment they’re confronting. Ai’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors has adorned hundreds of lampposts and bus shelters with portraits of refugees, and its 18 sculptural installations have recast several city landmarks, including the grand neoclassical arch in downtown Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Inside the arch, Ai has erected a 37-foot-tall metal cage that all but forces park visitors to walk through a passageway with contoured mirror walls. Suddenly, “an ordinary stroll through the park becomes a symbolic act—a crossing of borders, right in the middle of America’s most famous immigrant city.”
For the artist, the installation marries the personal and the political, said Casey Lesser in Artsy.net. Born in Beijing, Ai was only 1 in 1958 when his poet father and the rest of the family were forced to relocate to a distant labor camp during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. The artist’s later outspokenness won him the enmity of China’s current regime, and after living for four years under house arrest, he’s been a refugee from his own homeland since 2015. He’s spent much of the time since visiting refugee camps worldwide to create a documentary, titled Human Flow, that’s now playing in select theaters. The movie, in truth, achieves more visceral impact than his new street art does, but Good Fences “will make New Yorkers stop and think, or at least slow down.”
Each of the project’s best works “unsettles the world in which it intercedes,” said Jason Farago in The New York Times. In Queens, Ai has put up a distinctive fence around the giant steel globe that was the symbol of the 1964 World’s Fair. A soft, sock-like net, standing about knee-high, it functions as both a barrier and an invitation to lounge atop it. But the project’s standout sculpture is Gilded Cage, an “elegant, quietly ominous pavilion” that stands 24 feet tall and occupies a corner of Central Park just up the street from Trump Tower. When you step inside Ai’s golden cage and look upward to the sky, you’ll be struck by the work’s abstract beauty. But you’re aware, too, that the gilding mimics President Trump’s tastes, and that you’re both protected by the cage and trapped. It’s the subtle showpiece in a collection of quietly potent interventions— “a hundred muted bells that add up to a deafening alarm.”