ESSAYS, ARTICLES & LECTURES

Ai Weiwei Asks New York

Do Good Fences Really Make Good Neighbors?

HuffPost, October 29, 2017.

With his new project, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, titled after a line in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” Ai Weiwei challenges New Yorkers to contemplate the “something” that “doesn’t love a wall.” What is it that does not want to be confined or to confine, that wants to open up to the world, to be free from what contains and keeps us from ourselves and from each other? 

For the past several years, Ai Weiwei has focused on the plight of the 60 million refugees who have sought asylum in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the world. In 2015, thousands of migrants fled the war in Syria in precarious inflatable boats and landed on the Greek Island of Lesbos. Ai Weiwei felt compelled to meet them there, to record their arrivals, and to salvage the thousands of dangerously inadequate life vests left behind, using them for his many sculptural and video exhibitions focused on the question of migration. In multiple forms, Ai Weiwei has tried to communicate the fact that millions of people are now on the move, without a country in which to settle or a home to which they can return. Most recently, he has directed Human Flow, a feature-length film that traverses twenty-three countries and beautifully, intimately, captures the scope of the human crisis these massive migrations represent. 

Ai Weiwei wants to know: What keeps humans from feeling the pain of others and opening hearts and borders to those thrown into an impossible state of displacement? Is it the sheer massiveness of the problem that daunts us or the bombardment of images that eventually exhausts our empathic response? What makes an artist like Ai Weiwei transform his own life to tell this particular story?

Ai Weiwei lived his first sixteen years in the Chinese province of Xinjiang with his parents, exiled to that remote location by the government. His father, Ai Ching, and his mother, Cao Ying, were forced to leave Bejing in 1958 and to remain in the outpost during most of the Cultural Revolution. At this time, his father, a once renowned poet who had fallen out of political favor, was forced to do hard labor and humiliating public service. It was there, under those conditions, that Ai Weiwei was raised. The family had to destroy all of their books, which were considered dangerous, and Ai Weiwei received no formal education during that time. As a result of these early experiences—and the stress his parents experienced until his father was reinstated in 1976 after Mao Zedong’s death—Ai Weiwei became sensitized to what it means to have one’s family uprooted by history. 

Like his father, Ai Weiwei also has fallen out of favor with the Chinese government and, as a result, he no longer feels safe in his native country. His “citizens’ investigation” of the 8.0 Sichuan earthquake that occurred in May 2008 led him to condemn the government’s refusal to publish the names of the 5,335 children who died in the badly constructed schools that collapsed. Since then, his relationship to the government has changed. His blogs began in 2006 at the encouragement of the Chinese government, which was then trying to publicize the use of the Internet, but were condemned by 2009 because Ai Weiwei wrote critically about government censorship and repressive tactics. Sometimes blogging for eight hours a day, he overtly challenged China’s crackdown on freedom of speech and expression. As a result of his strong stance and his support of others on trial for so-called subversive acts, he and his family were harassed and his studio was destroyed. He was beaten so badly that he almost died from a brain hemorrhage. Later he was detained, accused of tax evasion, and did not know whether he would ever be released. Out of this experience Ai Weiwei produced an incredible series of diorama-like sculptures called S.A.C.R.E.D. The work depicted scenes from the eighty-one days of oppressive detention when, confined to a small room, he was never left alone to sleep, eat, shower, or use the toilet. When the government finally returned his passport in 2015, he joined his girlfriend and their child in Berlin. He relocated his studio there soon after. 

Ai Weiwei himself is a migrant, exiled from his own home, albeit now financially secure and welcome in many countries, even in the United States, which has become so unwelcoming to many others. But he is separated from his native language, his own country, and his mother, who, feeling too old, refuses to leave her house in China. Perhaps all these conditions have opened his heart to those without a home or an image of the future, those who live in a suspended state, waiting for their lives to begin again. 

Out of his deep concern for humanity’s precarious condition has evolved Ai Weiwei’s newest and perhaps most ambitious art piece to date: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, produced by the Public Art Fund. An array of different types of security fences and interventions mark 300 locations throughout New York City, making viewers aware of the access we have and the access we do not have.

Many of these sites are deeply meaningful to Ai Weiwei, who lived in the United States from 1981 to 1993. A 40-foot-tall steel cage, with a polished mirror passageway in the shape of two cutout figures standing side by side, marks an accessible entrance through the Triumphal Arch at Washington Square Park. A traditional woven-fence barrier blocks what was once open space between columns at Cooper Union. The “Gilded Cage” encases revolving gates, like those blocking passage on many border crossings. It sits on the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park. Throughout the city, laser-cut banners hang from lampposts and above storefronts, displaying images of migrants in motion and in refugee camps and images of well-known immigrants from history. These historical figures remind us that many in need of a home came to the United States with great hope for their futures. In exchange, they helped build the intellectual, scientific, and creative brain trust of this country that continues to revitalize it to this day. 

At the corner of Manhattan Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem, this text, posted on the glass of a bus stop shelter, took me by surprise. It is Ai Weiwei speaking to anyone who might be listening: 

“When you see thousands,
even millions of refugees,
the only conclusion you arrive at
is, that very few people care.
It’s not just happening in one place.
It’s not happening for one reason.
It’s everywhere.”

Ai Weiwei has created a memorial to the ongoing, global, catastrophic, crisis of migration. Each time we encounter its fences, banners, and texts, we must acknowledge that while many of us pursue our normal lives others cannot. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is a sculptural, conceptual intervention into our daily lives that confronts collective amnesia. It too is everywhere, designed to remind us that our nation continues to be indebted to the multitudes of immigrants who brought and continue to bring their brilliance and strength to this country every day—lest we ever lose our course as a nation and, in a betrayal of our own history, dare to forget.

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