He has worked his way through refugee camps, capturing the stories of migrants across the world. Now celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has brought the fruits of his labor to New York, scattering over 300 works across the metropolis. Weiwei’s most ambitious outdoor project to date, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” — which takes its name from a line in a poem by Robert Frost — formally opened Thursday and will run until mid-February. It’s a love letter of sorts to a city the artist, 60, called home from 1983 to 1993, and a new illustration of his empathy for refugees worldwide — stemming from his own experience of being exiled after his father, a poet, was branded an enemy of the Chinese state. “I need to pay back my love,” Weiwei insisted at a press conference in Central Park, honoring “a city (where) every young artist wants to be,” where “you never feel you are a foreigner.” But the location of one of his large-scale works — a “Gilded Cage” installed at the southeast entrance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He has worked his way through refugee camps, capturing the stories of migrants across the world. Now celebrated Chinese artist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications"],"yoast_head":"\n