He has also become internationally recognized as a result of his actions that challenge the political status quo in China. Despite his arrest and detention for eighty-one days in , the artist has continued to create art that transcends dualities between East and West, focusing on fundamental questions about the interrelations between art, culture, society, and individual experience. Many of his works employ simple forms and methods that evoke and play with notions of conceptual and Minimal art, while others manipulate traditional furniture, ancient pottery, and daily objects in ways that question cultural values and political authority.
Ai has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications worldwide. In , he was detained and put under house arrest until June The exhibition runs from May 12—April 7, Bare Life Section The first section, Bare Life , encompasses artworks that elevate into the realm of visibility those whose humanity has been ignored.
Ebsworth Gallery, visitors encounter the mesmerizing Forever Bicycles , a large-scale, site-specific installation that dominates the center of the room.
Composed of stainless steel bicycles, the artwork is a readymade of sorts, diagonally bisecting the gallery while also creating a monumental arch through which visitors can pass. Using hybrid artistic languages, Ai insists on the universal urgency of human coexistence in a shared world while bringing empathy and visibility to precarious lives.
Other projects in the section use the medium of film to focus on the effects of war and displacement across the world. A focal point of this section, Through —8 is a monumental installation not previously exhibited in the United States. The work is constructed from immense wooden pillars sourced from demolished temples. Once Ai Weiwei returned to China, he engaged in a series of politically motivated activities, often occasioned by government ineptitude or repression. These actions resulted in the artist being arrested in April on charges of tax evasion—a governmental charge that was not without cause, but which made him world famous.
In fact, the artist had been harassed for some time—two years earlier, in , Ai Weiwei was beaten up by Chinese police in Chengdu, occasioning emergency brain surgery in Germany. With world-wide media focusing attention on him, Ai WeiWei has become a symbol of humanitarian liberalism, which his current New York City project would seem to support.
Entitled Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, which is a quotation taken from a poem by Robert Frost, the project entails art placed in three hundred locations throughout the five boroughs of New York City; the art includes major sculptural installations—including one under the arch in Washington Square Park; and another, in front of the southeast entrance to Central Park—as well as posters at bus stops and banners on light poles.
This undertaking has consolidated Ai Weiwei as a major public figure in art worldwide. But the artist has been well known for some time; thus, the situation is more complex than it seems. Ai Weiwei has consistently sought the limelight as an artist, although the attention given to him is based more on his political actions than his creativity.
His political activism, at least in China, is personal; his father was a well-known poet who lost favor with Mao, who had him and his family exiled to the provinces. Because he has had his own experience of banishment, he is clearly capable of identifying with the plight of people in a similar situation worldwide. One hardly dares to criticize so humanitarian a project, but perhaps it can be said that Good Fences invests more energy in its social program than in artistic achievement.
How could it be otherwise? As a result, many artists are hampered by the historical or political requirements of their theme. In the case of Ai Weiwei, the motive is transparent: the plight of the refugee worldwide. Who would disagree with the nobility of the sentiment? The hardship of the refugee cannot be turned aside. But the sympathy cannot locate a responsible monster as the antagonists are anonymous—or too numerous to contemplate.
The support is already there. The point being made—the necessity for sympathetic treatment of the refugee—is a self-evident truism. In consequence, the issue becomes slack as art because there is no tension—no visible hostility between the victim and the perpetrator, who remains more or less anonymous. It might even be said that, as a result of lost relations between the injured party and the person s responsible, the project veers toward sentiment.
Principle becomes secondary in the face of a feel-good situation that is likely unable to effect actual change. Surely Ai Weiwei, a highly intelligent artist and political gadfly, must know this.
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