Tag Archives: ai weiwei

ART AT A TIME LIKE THIS: LIVESTREAM CONVERSATION WITH JERRY SALTZ

Jerry Saltz will discuss his new book and the state of art during the age of corona in live online conversation (photo courtesy Jerry Saltz)

Who: Jerry Saltz, Barbara Pollack, Anne Verhallen
What: Book and art talk with Jerry Saltz
Where: Livestream (email info@artatatimelikethis for password)
When: Friday, April 17, free, 4:00
Why: Rock star art critic Jerry Saltz’s latest book has come along at just the right moment. How to Be an Artist (Riverhead Books, March 2020, $22) guides you through the creation of art — by anyone, regardless of talent and skill — espousing a dedicated work ethic, something that many of us are paradoxically demonstrating more than ever now that we’re stuck at home. “I have tried every way in the world to stop work-block or fear of working, of failure. There is only one method that works: work. And keep working,” Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning senior art critic for New York magazine, writes in the book. “Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep. I do all the time. Jasper Johns famously said, ‘One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.’ How many times have you been given a whole career in your dreams and not heeded it? It doesn’t matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work. Work is the only thing that takes the curse of fear away.”

On March 17, Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen launched Art at a Time Like This, a website that features the work of a different artist every weekday, focusing on the question “How can you think of art at a time like this?” Among the participating artists are Ai Weiwei, Mickalene Thomas, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Dread Scott & Jenny Pollak, Marilyn Minter, and Dan Perjovschi, presenting new and older paintings, photographs, and videos, all of which illuminate in some way the crisis we are facing together, the onslaught of Covid-19, which has shut down galleries and museums around the world.

how to be an artist

A social media icon, Saltz will join Pollack and Verhallen on April 17 at 4:00 for a live online conversation about the state of art on a planet in lockdown. “Jerry Saltz is a natural for livestream because he is the completely accessible art critic, dedicated to reaching all kinds of art lovers, from the aficionado to the art-curious,” Pollack told twi-ny. “His new book puts forth the insane idea that anyone can be an artist, or at least artistic. Of course, people love him for this!”

As someone who has been writing about art for nearly twenty years, I’ve been forced to reconsider how we all experience art during this pandemic, looking at it onscreen, right next to Facebook, Google, and my day-job site. Obviously it’s not the same, and I have to admit I at first had trouble adjusting, but I’m getting more used to it every day. But can you critique a work of art you’ve seen only online, not in person? When viewed in real life, you can sense a painting’s texture, its physical presence; a photograph can envelop you and shake your surroundings loose; and videos can beam out from unique sculptural installations. But when is the next time any of us is likely to step foot in a gallery or museum in the five boroughs (or elsewhere)? What will things be like once they do reopen? Will crowds descend on MoMA and the Met like they did before corona?

In his October review of the new MoMA for New York magazine, a piece entitled, “What Does the New MoMA Mean for Modernism? And What Was Modernism Anyway?,” Saltz wrote, “Here’s how art has already moved on. Modernism is now just part of art history to artists, and not even the only or best part.” How will art move on after Covid-19? What will become part of art history? I can’t wait to hear what Saltz has to say about what will become of art’s future.

AI WEIWEI: GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS

One hundred banners throughout the city identify the plight of specific refugees (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations in all five boroughs
Through February 11, free
www.publicartfund.org
aiweiwei.com
good fences slideshow

There’s less than a week left to experience as much as you can of dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s extraordinary “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” Public Art Fund project, consisting of a variety of works at more than three hundred locations in all five boroughs. The massive installation went up October 12, in conjunction with the release of his stunning documentary, Human Flow, in which he visited twenty-three countries in order to personalize the global refugee crisis. The exhibition takes its title from the last words of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” which includes the line “We keep the wall between us as we go.”

Ai Weiwei takes on the international migrant crisis in widespread exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As Congress and the president battle over immigration reform, sanctuary cities, deportation, the fate of the Dreamers, and the construction of a wall on the Mexico border, Ai, whose family was exiled for political reasons when he was a child, shares hundreds of works in five main groups. Banner photographs of two hundred individual refugees, printed on double-sided cut black vinyl, jut out from lampposts that make it appear as if the person is disappearing into thin air right before our eyes. Ai has also created one hundred “Good Neighbors” photos of refugees arriving in countries and settling in makeshift camps in Bangladesh, Turkey, Lebanon, Gaza, and Greece. Classical Greek–style friezes, called “Odyssey,” depict scenes of the refugee crisis in black-and-white, from military maneuvers to people living in tents. “Exodus” is a series of black-and-white linked banners on Essex St., filled with symbolism, showing families leaving their homes and searching for a new place to live. (One part hovers over a pizzeria called Roma, evoking the plight of Romani refugees.) Fences have been installed in between buildings on the Lower East Side, a major immigrant area where Ai lived in the 1980s. And gates have been added to bus shelters in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, equating borders with public transportation that can take riders just about anywhere.

Ai Weiwei has installed a unique passage underneath the Washington Square arch (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Several one-of-a-kind site-specific works further connect with the history of the city. Inside the Washington Square arch, Ai has installed a thirty-seven-foot steel cage with a passage in the outline of two giant people; off to the side are empty jail-like cells. Washington Square Park, of course, is famous for its diversity and acceptance of everyone; however, it has also been the site of protests and class and race riots. Five fences cover large windows on the facade of the Cooper Union, the institution where Abraham Lincoln gave a critical speech on slavery and the two major political parties on February 27, 1860.

Gilded Cage sits on the edge of busy Central Park entrance (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Gilded Cage” resides on Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park on Fifth Ave. and Sixtieth St., a large circular cage, bathed in gold, with a door so tourists and New Yorkers can go inside, where there are hard-to-reach turnstiles that represent yet another blockage. The first time I was there, I watched as a white couple in tuxedo and wedding dress went in and had pictures taken by their photographer, none of whom were quite getting the irony. It reminded me of wealthy people who pay to spend a night in jail as part of a fundraising gathering.

Rope barrier around Unisphere isolates the globe from the one of the most diverse places in the world (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Finally, “Circle Fence” is a hammock-like rope barrier surrounding the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, a giant globe constructed for the 1964–65 World’s Fair in Queens, welcoming visitors from all over the planet to one of the most diverse areas on Earth. The fence is only a few feet high, sectioned off by geometric shapes in a repeating sequence. Feel free to sit or lie down on it, although not every area is conducive to comfort. While I was walking around it, a Chinese bride and groom, wearing traditional red outfits, and their wedding party arrived for pictures. They all pulled themselves over the barrier relatively easily, then posed for pictures with the Unisphere behind them. I have a feeling Ai would have gotten a big kick out of this timely interaction.

HUMAN FLOW WITH AI WEIWEI IN PERSON

Ai Weiwei takes a close look at the international refugee crisis in Human Flow

HUMAN FLOW (Ai Weiwei, 2017)
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-255-2243, Wednesday, January 3, 4:30
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St., 718-636-4100, Wednesday, January 3, 7:00
www.humanflow.com

On January 3, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei will travel from Manhattan to Brooklyn, participating in two Q&As following screenings of his stunning new documentary, Human Flow. This past fall, Ai had several concurrent exhibitions in New York City that dealt with the international refugee crisis. At Deitch Projects in SoHo, “Laundromat” included racks of clothing that had been worn by Syrian refugees at the Idomeni refugee camp in Iraq, all freshly cleaned and pressed, as if ready to give the migrant men, women, and children a new lease on life. Among other items, the gallery show also featured several monitors playing footage that Ai had shot in various refugee camps, film that has now been turned into Human Flow. In 2016, Ai and his crew traveled to twenty-three countries, visiting dozens of camps in a year in which it was estimated that there were as many as 65 million displaced people around the world, fleeing war, poverty, famine, and persecution. In his first full-length documentary, Ai moves from macro to micro, shooting at a variety of scales. He uses drones to photograph tent cities in the desert from high above — reminiscent of the photography of Edward Burtynsky, turning individual items into parts of a vast pattern — along with gorgeous scenes of deserts and seascapes and intimate cell-phone footage and handheld camera shots that put viewers right in the middle of these makeshift villages, where some families live for decades. Ai, with his scruffy gray beard and in a hoodie, is often shown not only taking cell-phone videos but helping out and mingling with the refugees as dinghies arrive on the shores of Lesbos, Greece, or playfully trading passports with a refugee. Throughout the film, men and women stand proudly, often in traditional dress, looking directly at the camera for extended lengths of time, establishing their unique individuality, putting faces to what is most often seen in news clips as swaths of people struggling to survive. As Ai travels to each successive camp, he posts relevant quotes from writers and philosophers from that nation, from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the Dhammapada Buddhist scripture, and Persian poet Baba Tahir to Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, Syrian poet Adonis, and U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Details about the situations are sometimes delivered news-crawl-style, along the bottom of the screen.

Ai Weiwei gets deeply involved in situation in Human Flow

In addition to giving voice to the refugees themselves — “Where am I supposed to start my new life?” one woman asks — Ai speaks with crisis workers on the ground and United Nations officials and other experts, such as UNHCR Communications Officer Boris Cheshirkov, Princess Dana Firas of Jordan, Human Rights Watch Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UNHCR Pakistan Senior Operation Coordinator Marin Din Kajdomcaj, UNICEF Lebanon representative Tanya Chapuisat, former Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, Dr. Cem Terzi of the Association of Bridging Peoples, and Dr. Kemal Kirişci, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who gets right to the point, explaining, “It’s going to be a big challenge to recognize that the world is shrinking, and people from different religions, different cultures, are going to have to learn to live with each other.” The powerful, immersive film was edited by Niels Pagh Andersen, who worked on Joshua Oppenheimer’s searing The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, from nine hundred hours of footage, with a score by Karsten Fundal and a dozen cinematographers, among them Ai, Christopher Doyle, Zhang Zanbo, Konstantinos Koukoulis, and Johannes Waltermann. “The more immune you are to people suffering, that’s very, very dangerous. It’s critical for us to maintain this humanity,” one woman says, and that gets right to the heart of the film. Human Flow is very personal to Ai, whose own battles with Chinese authorities and exile — he spent much of his childhood in a hard labor camp in the Gobi Desert because his father, a poet and intellectual, was part of a revolutionary group, and as an adult Ai has been imprisoned, placed under house arrest, and beaten for his activism — were detailed in the Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. A masterful Conceptualist whose work explores sociocultural elements through a historical lens, Ai has always believed that artists have a responsibility to reveal the truth, and that’s precisely what he does in Human Flow, with a determined fearlessness to do what’s right.

In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments, thirteen thousand refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, walk through the Greek countryside toward the Macedonian border, only to find that a fence has been erected and the entrance is now closed, leaving them with nowhere to go. It’s a harrowing scene, but Ai is no mere doomsayer. There are many shots in the film that show children running about and playing, laughing and smiling for the camera, still filled with hope for a better life. It’s the rest of the world’s job to make that happen, and as Ai exemplifies, every one of us can make a difference. Ai will participate in Q&As following the 4:30 screening at the Quad as part of the “One Shots” series and after the 7:00 show at BAMcinématek, the latter moderated by Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, Astro Noise). The film was released in conjunction with the Public Art Fund project “Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” consisting of dozens of installations and interventions in all five boroughs: at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the Washington Square Arch, the Unisphere, Essex Street Market, the Cooper Union, bus shelters, lampposts, newsstand kiosks, and other locations, furthering Ai’s artistic ideas about immigrant bans and the treatment of refugees, spread across a city he called home in the 1980s.

HUMAN FLOW

Ai Weiwei takes a close look at the international refugee crisis in Human Flow

HUMAN FLOW (Ai Weiwei, 2017)
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Landmark at 57 West, 657 West 57th St. at 12th Ave.
Opens Friday, October 13
www.humanflow.com

This past fall, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had several concurrent exhibitions in New York City that dealt with the international refugee crisis. At Deitch Projects in SoHo, “Laundromat” included racks of clothing that had been worn by Syrian refugees at the Idomeni refugee camp in Iraq, all freshly cleaned and pressed, as if ready to give the migrant men, women, and children a new lease on life. Among other items, the gallery show also featured several monitors playing footage that Ai had shot in various refugee camps, film that has now been turned into the stunning documentary Human Flow. In 2016, Ai and his crew traveled to twenty-three countries, visiting dozens of camps in a year in which it was estimated that there were as many as 65 million displaced people around the world, fleeing war, poverty, famine, and persecution. In his first full-length documentary, Ai moves from macro to micro, shooting at a variety of scales. He uses drones to photograph tent cities in the desert from high above — reminiscent of the photography of Edward Burtynsky, turning individual items into parts of a vast pattern — along with gorgeous scenes of deserts and seascapes and intimate cell-phone footage and handheld camera shots that put viewers right in the middle of these makeshift villages, where some families live for decades. Ai, with his scruffy gray beard and in a hoodie, is often shown not only taking cell-phone videos but helping out and mingling with the refugees as dinghies arrive on the shores of Lesbos, Greece, or playfully trading passports with a refugee. Throughout the film, men and women stand proudly, often in traditional dress, looking directly at the camera for extended lengths of time, establishing their unique individuality, putting faces to what is most often seen in news clips as swaths of people struggling to survive. As Ai travels to each successive camp, he posts relevant quotes from writers and philosophers from that nation, from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the Dhammapada Buddhist scripture, and Persian poet Baba Tahir to Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, Syrian poet Adonis, and U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Details about the situations are sometimes delivered news-crawl-style, along the bottom of the screen.

Ai Weiwei gets deeply involved in situation in Human Flow

In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments, thirteen thousand refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, walk through the Greek countryside toward the Macedonian border, only to find that a fence has been erected and the entrance is now closed, leaving them with nowhere to go. It’s a harrowing scene, but Ai is no mere doomsayer. There are many shots in the film that show children running about and playing, laughing and smiling for the camera, still filled with hope for a better life. It’s the rest of the world’s job to make that happen, and as Ai exemplifies, every one of us can make a difference. Human Flow opens at the Angelika and the Landmark at 57 West on October 13; Ai will participate in Q&As following the 7:00 screening at the Landmark on October 13 and after the 1:50 show on October 14 at the Angelika. The film is being released in conjunction with the Public Art Fund project “Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” consisting of dozens of installations and interventions in all five boroughs: at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the Washington Square Arch, the Unisphere, Essex Street Market, the Cooper Union, bus shelters, lampposts, newsstand kiosks, and other locations, furthering Ai’s artistic ideas about immigrant bans and the treatment of refugees, spread across a city he called home in the 1980s.

JACQUES HERZOG, PIERRE DE MEURON, AI WEIWEI: HANSEL AND GRETEL

Visitors’ paths are closely followed in immersive “Hansel & Gretel” installation at Park Avenue Armory (photo by James Ewing)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 6, $15 (free with IDNYC card)
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Upon walking into the Park Avenue Armory through a small back entrance on Lexington Ave. and Sixty-Sixth St. to see the immersive, interactive exhibition “Hansel & Gretel,” visitors face the following statement on a wall in front of them: “What would be a suspicious text?” The exhibit, the latest collaboration between Chinese dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei and Swiss Pritzker Prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, is all about suspicion. It is both a fun and revealing exploration of surveillance in the twenty-first century, best experienced with no advance knowledge, so I strongly advise you to stop reading now and pick up where you left off after you have made your way through the two parts of the eye-opening show. After walking down an eerie hallway, you emerge into the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, totally dark aside from occasional pockets of light — fewer if you are lucky enough to be there when there are not many other people, more if you are there when it’s busy. You are unsure of every step, as the material under your feet feels unsafe and there appear to be rises and dips, so your physical safety is threatened by the unknown. Soon you reach a series of large rectangular grids on which are cast white and red electronic lines that trace your path, along with distorted photographs of your head and body taken by infrared cameras located across the ceiling. Occasionally a drone whirs by overhead, the propellers sending down a burst of wind while the drones take yet more pictures of you. “Here the breadcrumbs of the famous Hansel and Gretel fairy tale are not eaten by birds but rather digital crumbs are gathered and stored, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s poignant 1953 science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451, where an omniscient state surveils its citizens from the skies,” curators Tom Eccles and Hans-Ulrich Obrist write in the exhibition program.

Latest collaboration by Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meuron reveals much about privacy and surveillance in the twenty-first century (photo by James Ewing)

The installation then leads you outside, where you walk around the block to enter through the main doors on Park Avenue and encounter a series of tables with available laptops in the hallways of the Head House, lined with blurry large-scale photographs of the people around you. The computers offer an illuminating look into the history of surveillance and frightening military drone statistics while also providing background information on the creation of the project, including the facial recognition technology by Adam Harvey, the floor projections by iart, and the drones by PhotoFlight Aerial Media and Easy Aerial. Despite having just been surveiled in the drill hall, you are likely to have the computer take your photo, locate your image in its database, and reveal it on the wall — and you’re even more likely to be happy about your face now joining photos of other exhibition-goers and the portraits of American military heroes that regularly fill the hallway. It’s a brilliant commentary on how blithely we leave our personal trail of crumbs now, inured to constantly sharing our email addresses, phone numbers, image, and other facts about ourselves via social media and online purchasing. “I think we all have a personal experience of being under surveillance, but the character of surveillance is that you only see one side of the story,” Ai, who knows what it’s like to be under 24/7 watch, said at the press opening. Ai, Herzog, and de Meuron, whose fifteen-year collaboration includes the Bird’s Nest Stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion at the London 2012 Festival — Herzog and de Meuron are also overseeing the restoration of the Park Avenue Armory itself — have created an immersive environment that is far from a fairy-tale world and instead a dramatic and engaging public space that highlights just how much we have accepted being tracked constantly. A pair of tiny keyholes in the door at the top of the balcony lets viewers move aside brass disks to secretly observe installation visitors below, a down-to-earth analog reminder of the age-old delight humans take in spying on one another, now magnified by today’s technology into monstrous, inescapable form — with an added soupçon of exhibitionistic enjoyment.

MARCEL DUCHAMP’S “FOUNTAIN” TURNS 100

Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain,” (1950 version of 1917 original), Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition, gift (by exchange) of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1998 (© Artists Rights Society, ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp)

On Sunday, April 9, at 3:00, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has an extensive collection of works by French ready-made Dada master Marcel Duchamp, will host The Richard Mutt Case, a site-specific performance by members of Pig Iron Theatre Company reenacting the scandal over Duchamp’s most famous piece, the upside-down porcelain urinal known as “Fountain,” which the Society of Independent Artists rejected for an open New York exhibition exactly one hundred years ago. In celebration of the centennial, the museum is offering free entry between 3:00 and 4:00 on Sunday to visitors who say “Richard Mutt” or “R. Mutt,” the name used to sign “Fountain” (it actually says “R. Mutt”), at the admissions desk. The event is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Marcel Duchamp and the Fountain Scandal,” which continues through December 3. So why is a publication entitled “This Week in New York” hyping something happening in Philadelphia? Well, there are numerous museums around the world participating in the free-admission password homage, including institutions in Beijing, Jerusalem, Stockholm, Basel, London, Kyoto, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. No New York City museum has officially stated that it will be taking part in the program, which is too bad. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Getting rejected could make you empathize a bit with Duchamp, who wrote at the time to his sister, “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; it was not at all indecent — no reason for refusing it. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.” One hundred years later, it is still valuable gossip. (For an additional New York City angle, on April 10, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, a major Duchamp collector located on West Fifty-Seventh St., will open “Marcel Duchamp Fountain: An Homage,” consisting of related works by John Baldessari, Marcel Dzama, Sherrie Levine, Sophie Matisse, Richard Pettibone, Ai Weiwei, and more than two dozen others that were directly influenced by “Fountain,” which went missing many years ago.)

AI WEIWEI — 2016: ROOTS AND BRANCHES / LAUNDROMAT

A tree grows in Chelsea at the Lisson Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

2016: ROOTS AND BRANCHES
Lisson Gallery
504 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Mary Boone Gallery
541 West 24th St., 745 Fifth Ave. between 57th & 58th Sts.
AI WEIWEI: LAUNDROMAT
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster St.
Through December 23, free
aiweiwei.com

This past October, Chinese dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei swept into New York City, giving a talk at the Brooklyn Museum and opening four gallery exhibitions. He had been banned from international travel for four years since his March 2011 arrest and disappearance, and didn’t receive his passport back until July 2015. So it should not be surprising that the works deal with issues of home and planting roots, particularly in relation to the current refugee crisis around the world. At Lisson Gallery, one of three parts of “Ai Weiwei 2016: Roots and Branches” features giant, rusting cast-iron tree trunks and roots, creating a kind of dying forest, surrounded by black-and-white wallpaper depicting friezes of armed soldiers, explicitly referencing warriors on Ancient Greek black-figure vases; the same archaizing style is applied to modern military vehicles hovering around tent cities and rounding up men, women, and children; storms raging above dangerously overcrowded boats; people being carried away on stretchers; and signs on barbed-wire fences proclaiming, “No One Is Illegal,” “Open the Border,” and “#SafePassage.”

Ai Weiwei’s “Tree” rises up at Mary Boone in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At Mary Boone in Chelsea, Ai has planted “Tree,” a twenty-five-foot-high twisting tree composed of parts of dead trees bolted together to form something new, a totem that evokes how every person is made of DNA from different cultures and traditions (as well as, of course, much of the same DNA). It’s an imposing structure standing in front of gold-and-white wallpaper showing elegant, circular patterns of surveillance cameras. Also on view are a Warhol-like self-portrait and a triptych of Ai’s famous “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” both made using LEGO pieces like pixels, in addition to “Treasure Box,” a large, wooden box resembling a Chinese puzzle.

Ai Weiwei’s “Spouts Installation” gives the finger to China’s past (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At Mary Boone’s Midtown location, “Spouts Installation” consists of forty thousand ceramic spouts broken off from teapots dating from the Song to Qing dynasties, fracturing China’s past. Kaleidoscopic gray-and-white wallpaper features arms giving the finger, referencing Ai’s “Fuck Off” series, in which he takes photographs of himself flipping the bird in front of historical landmarks around the globe. The juxtaposition also makes the spouts, arranged in a circle around a central pole that is like a tree, look like a shadowy graveyard of broken middle fingers that have been silenced while also recalling Ai’s “Sunflower Seeds” installations at the Tate and Mary Boone in Chelsea. In the back room are the wooden box “Garbage Container,” the porcelain doormat “Blossom,” a glass-encased “Set of Spouts,” and the porcelain “Free Speech Puzzle.”

Ai Weiwei explores the refugee crisis in “Laundromat” at Deitch Projects (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Finally, at Deitch Projects in Soho, “Ai Weiwei: Laundromat” is a large room filled with racks of clothing, rows of shoes, stills from new films lining the walls, social media posts on the floor, a documentary video, and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “September on Jessore Road.” (“Millions of fathers in rain / Millions of mothers in pain / Millions of brothers in woe / Millions of sisters nowhere to go.” Inspired by the conditions at the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greek-FYROM border, the Shariya refugee camp in Iraq, and the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Ai has sought to give voice back to these refugees, who are suffering through war and extreme poverty; there is a deeply personal aspect to the work, as Ai’s family was sent to a labor camp when he was a child because his father was a poet and political dissident. The clothing and shoes are the real items worn by Syrian refugees at Idomeni — it’s particularly haunting seeing the racks of children’s clothing and rows of kids’ shoes — now properly cleaned instead of caked with mud and filth, each one individually tagged, as if offering each man, woman, and child a clean, new start, with renewed dignity.