Ai Weiwei, Chinese Art Legend, Plans To Erect Huge Metal Fences Across NYC

NEW YORK, NY — Beginning this October and lasting through next February, expect at least 10 huge "metal wire security fences" and dozens of smaller offshoot installations to pop up throughout the city's five boroughs, the city's Public Art Fund warned this week.

Legendary Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei plans to erect the fences as part of his largest-ever outdoor exhibit, called "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" — a line from the Robert Frost poem "Mending Wall."

The point of all this? To "draw attention to the role of the fence as both a physical manifestation and metaphorical expression of division," the Public Art Fund said, and to "explore one of society’s most urgent issues, namely the psychic and physical barriers that divide us, which is at the heart of debates about immigration and refugees today."

Weiwei is still figuring out where exactly in the city to build his fences, an Art Fund spokeswoman told Patch.

He has, however, decided on these locations so far:

• Essex Street Market, Lower East Side, Manhattan
• Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Astor Place, East Village, Manhattan
• JCDecaux-brand bus shelters in Brooklyn (exact bus shelters are TBD, but here's a map of JCDecaux's hundreds of bus shelters across the borough)
• Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, Manhattan
• Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens
• Other "unexpected urban contexts across the city — on rooftops, in spaces between buildings, on bus shelters, as freestanding sculptures, and more — as if growing out of the existing urban landscape"

"This is still very much in development," the Art Fund spokeswoman said Monday. What she did know, though, is that "there will be over 100 interventions across the city, from large scale to small scale."

In a statement circulated by the city, Weiwei said of his project:

“I was an immigrant in New York in the 1980s for ten years and the issue with the migration crisis has been a longtime focus of my practice. The fence has always been a tool in the vocabulary of political landscaping and evokes associations with words like ‘border,’ ‘security,’ and ‘neighbor,’ which are connected to the current global political environment. But what’s important to remember is that while barriers have been used to divide us, as humans we are all the same. Some are more privileged than others, but with that privilege comes a responsibility to do more.”

After returning to Beijing from NYC in the 1990s, Weiwei became more and more critical of the Chinese government, and didn't shy from showing it through art and other actions.

In 2011, fed up, Chinese officials notoriously destroyed his Shanghai art studio; detained him at the airport when he tried to leave the country; and threw him in jail for nearly three months without trial — an apparent message to the public, human-rights watchers said, that even a local celebrity like Weiwei couldn't challenge the government without repercussions. It would be another four years before the artist, by then an international figure, was granted a passport and allowed to leave the country in summer 2015.

Since then, Weiwei's exhibitions — including one in which he threw thousands of Syrian refugee life jackets into the Belvedere Palace pond in Vienna — have largely focused on bringing audiences face-to-face with the modern migration and refugee crisis.

His NYC fences appear to be an extension of that theme, only super-sized. The project "will be Ai Weiwei’s largest and most ambitious public art exhibition to date," according to the city.

Images courtesy of the Public Art Fund