The Asian reporter., October 16, 2017, Page Page 8, Image 8

Page 8 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
U.S.A.
October 16, 2017
Huge immigration-themed exhibit by famed artist in NYC
NEW YORK (AP) — An enormous
exhibit by activist artist Ai Weiwei,
designed to draw attention to the world’s
refugee crisis, is now on view at some 300
sites around New York City.
“Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,”
presented by the Public Art Fund, is open
to the public through February 11.
A global trend of “trying to separate us
by color, race, religion, nationality” is a
blow “against freedom, against humanity,”
Ai said at a Manhattan press conference.
“That’s why I made a work related to this
issue.”
Ai, now based in Berlin, is considered
one of the world’s most successful artists.
He spent his childhood in a remote
Chinese community after his father, a
poet, was exiled by Communist authori-
ties. He came to New York City as an art
student in the 1980s, then returned to his
homeland in 1993, using his art and public
platform to address political issues. He
was alternately encouraged, tolerated,
and harassed, spending time in detention
and being barred for years from leaving
the country.
Since his passport was reinstated in
2015, Ai and his team have travelled to 23
countries and territories and more than 40
refugee camps while making a docu-
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mentary, Human Flow.
The New York exhibit includes three
large-scale works and ancillary works
throughout the city. Ai expressed a special
affinity for Manhattan’s Lower East Side,
his former home.
Art is incorporated onto flagpoles, bus
shelters, lampposts, newsstands, and roof-
tops. Banners bear portraits of immi-
grants from different periods, including
historic pictures from Ellis Island. There
are also images from Ai’s Human Flow
projects.
At Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman
Plaza, viewers are able to walk in and
around a work titled “Gilded Cage.”
The 24-foot-tall symbol of division
stands in powerful contrast to one of the
most visited urban public parks in the
U.S., the Public Art Fund says. “Designed
as a democratic oasis and vision of utopia,
Central Park has vast open areas, lush
forests, and monuments of heroes and
explorers,” it says.
Another cage-like structure, about 40
feet tall, is in Greenwich Village’s Wash-
ington Square Arch, built in 1892. “When I
lived in New York in the ’80s, I spent much
of my time in Washington Square Park,”
an area that was “a home to immigrants of
all backgrounds,” Ai said in a statement.
“The triumphal arch has been a symbol
CITYWIDE EXHIBIT. Chinese activist artist
Ai Weiwei participates in the BUILD Speaker Series to
discuss his film, Human Flow, at AOL Studios in New
York. An enormous exhibit by Ai, designed to draw at-
tention to the world’s refugee crisis, is now on view at
some 300 sites around New York City. (Photo by Evan
Agostini/Invision/AP)
of victory after war since antiquity,” he
said. “The basic form of a fence or cage
suggests that it might inhibit movement
through the arch, but instead a passage-
way cuts through this barrier — a door
obstructed, through which another door
opens.”
The third large-scale work is displayed
at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in
Queens, surrounded by some of the city’s
most diverse neighborhoods. “Circle
Fence” features a low, mesh netting
around the Unisphere, a 120-foot-diame-
ter globe commissioned for the 1964-1965
World’s Fair.
The big globe “celebrated both the dawn
of the space age and the fair’s broader
theme of Peace Through Understanding,”
according to the city’s parks department.
“Rather than impeding views of the
historical site,” says the Public Art Fund,
“the installation [emphasizes] the Uni-
sphere’s form and symbolic meaning,
engaging with the steel representation of
the earth.”