艾未未: 纽约1983-1993

Ai Weiwei: New York 1983–1993 is a selection of black-and-white photographs Ai Weiwei made while living in New York. It was drawn from a trove of more than 10,000 pictures and published in Beijing by Three Shadows in 2010.

Ai brought the photographs back to China in his luggage, mostly as negatives, and left them untouched for years. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre later developed and exhibited a selection. Booksellers describe this first edition as a bilingual English and Chinese hardcover. The pictures follow Ai’s life in the East Village and the neighborhood’s change from urban blight into a desirable district. The description booksellers reproduce points to events such as the Tompkins Square Park riots and the AIDS epidemic. A later paperback edition appeared from Gestalten in 2011 for the exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

Ai was born in Beijing in 1957 and graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York in 1993. His work spans sculpture, installation, photography, film, architecture and curation. The M+ museum in Hong Kong holds a New York 1983–1993 series of gelatin silver prints. It includes self-portraits, everyday scenes, and other artists and writers who left China for the West in the 1980s.