Ai Weiwei’s ‘Camouflage’ art installation reflects on FDR’s Four Freedoms

Amna Nawaz:

A new public art initiative marks the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, inviting artists to examine the state of democracy and social justice.

The very first featured artist is renowned Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, whose powerful blend of art and activism has long focused on global human rights.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy, and part of our Canvas coverage. '

Jeffrey Brown:

To spend time with the artist Ai Weiwei is to experience the playful.

Ai Weiwei, Artist and Activist: I see you from the lens. You see?

Jeffrey Brown:

Oh, yes.

Ai Weiwei:

Yes?

Jeffrey Brown:

The very serious.

Ai Weiwei:

We always have to defend the fundamental values about who we are. We have to defend humanity, human rights, freedom of speech.

Jeffrey Brown:

And always a sense of purpose in what art can do.

Ai Weiwei:

Art should be activism, because art is in questioning establishment. Art is in questioning what has already been as a fixed idea.

It looks so nice.

Jeffrey Brown:

On this day, I was getting a first look at his latest public artwork.

Ai Weiwei:

So beautiful. It's like under the water, right? You see the waves.

Jeffrey Brown:

A large installation titled Camouflage, the final touches still being applied at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park. Originally designed by famed architect Louis Kahn, it's a stunning setting, 3.5 acres on Roosevelt island on New York's East River between Queens and Manhattan with the United Nations building nearby.

Franklin Roosevelt, Former President of the United States: The first is freedom of speech and expression.

Jeffrey Brown:

That proximity is purposeful. The park is a monument to FDR and the Four Freedoms he called for in his January 1941 State of the Union speech, freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear, a vision for the future even as Nazi Germany had plunged Europe into war and the U.S. debated joining the fight.

Franklin Roosevelt:

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them.

Jeffrey Brown:

FDR's Four Freedoms would become founding principles of the United Nations charter, even as war, divisions and fear remain. Ai Weiwei in fact got the idea of camouflage from seeing it in a wartime setting on a visit he made to the front lines in Ukraine this past summer.

Ai Weiwei:

I hiding in Ukraine under the same kind of camouflage.

Jeffrey Brown:

Ai says he was interested in the various meanings of camouflage, hiding and protecting something, but also misleading. Look closely, there's that playfulness again. The netting is filled with thousands of images of cats, partly a nod to Roosevelt Island's history as an animal shelter — there's one just outside the park's gates — partly to the harm done to animals in war, but also a bit of personal history.

Ai Weiwei:

I always do work have layers meaning relating to aesthetics, like art history, and relate to political situations, my personal struggle. I have been living three or four lives, so just like a cat. Normally, we say cats have nine lives. I already spend maybe eight of them.

Jeffrey Brown:

Born in 1957, Ai Weiwei is the son of a renowned poet who was forced to leave Beijing with his family to be reeducated in a rural village during China's Cultural Revolution.

Ai came of age as part of a generation of young Chinese artists breaking out of past strictures and lived in the U.S. for 12 years starting in 1981. He first made his name as an art provocateur. One famous work shows him purposely breaking an ancient Han Dynasty urn. He had Chinese government support as a designer of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Bird Nest stadium, but then drew government anger leading to imprisonment in a four-year travel ban after he investigated and documented flimsy construction and corruption following a 2008 earthquake in which thousands died.

He's exhibited internationally, including a recent retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum titled Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei. And he travels the world, including for his 2017 film, "Human Flow," on international migration.

Always, he continues to explore and prod.

Howard Axel, Four Freedoms Park Conservancy:

He was obvious because he's been discussing these issues of democracy and surveillance and the human rights for so much of his career.

Jeffrey Brown:

Howard Axel heads the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, which programs park events and exhibitions, including this new project titled Art X Freedom, which grew out of a national rethinking of monuments and invites artists to create works to explore issues of social justice and freedom.

Howard Axel:

We can relook at our monuments and have them look forward and not always back.

Jeffrey Brown:

And here's a monument to a great American, and you're doing what to it?

Howard Axel:

And we're overlaying today and tomorrow with contemporary artists. We are in a moment where this is a question of democracy and voting and rights and is in the headlines every day,a time of conflict not only directly related to camouflage, but certainly conflict in our public debate.

And we wanted to use this space specifically to be part of that public debate. We're not going to tell them how to interpret it, but we are going to try to get people to think about it in their own lives.

Jeffrey Brown:

To that end, visitors are invited to write their personal reflections on ribbons and tie them to the netting. The most specific reference to conflict used by Ai Weiwei a neon sign bearing a Ukrainian proverb: "For some people war is war. For others, war is the dear mother."

Ai says, for him, art is about getting people to see their essential humanity and defending essential human values now more than ever.

Ai Weiwei:

Almost 80 years after this fundamental idea raised up by the President Roosevelt, we still see freedom of speech is at a very difficult time in the United States. I'm not talking about in China or North Korea, but right in the United States.

So I think, as a camouflage, the West always talks about humanity, freedom of speech, and democracy. But we have to see everything is at risk at this moment.

Jeffrey Brown:

Ai Weiwei's Camouflage is on view until November 10.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at FDR Four Freedoms Park in New York City's East River.