Ai Weiwei's public art installation Camouflage goes on view 10 September at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, directly across the East River from the United Nations and in tandem with its 2025 General Assembly—the 80th session since its founding at the end of the Second World War. At the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, designed by the architect Louis Kahn in 1973 and realised posthumously in 2012, Ai is draping the memorial to President Roosevelt in fabric the artist designed with silhouettes of cats to reinterpret ubiquitous camouflage patterns used as a means of concealment in wartime.
“It is a deeply militarized symbol,” Ai says of the tent-like structure, supported by scaffolding, that protects, or shrouds, the memorial celebrating Roosevelt's Four Freedoms—of speech, of religion, from want and from fear—espoused in his 1941 presidential address to the US Congress. “Presenting such an installation is necessary in a world marked by ongoing wars and the threat of even greater conflict.”
Art X Freedom
Camouflage marks the launch of Art X Freedom, the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy's new annual commissioning programme of public art intended to inspire conversation around issues of social justice. “Let’s try to add the power of public art at a park, close to the UN, that’s dedicated to government for the good,” says Howard Axel, the conservancy's chief executive, who is interested in compelling more people to make the short pilgrimage to the 3.5-acre park.
Ai Weiwei’s Camouflage is part of a new public art commission programme at Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island
© Ai Weiwei. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry, courtesy of Camber Studio
Like many New Yorkers, the acclaimed 68-year-old Chinese artist and activist, who now lives in Portugal, had never been to the park before touring it last November with Axel. On the triangular tip of the island, dramatically sited between Manhattan and Queens, Kahn designed two long alleys of Linden trees converging at a colossal bronze head of Roosevelt, poised within a granite niche. Carved on its backside is an excerpt from his Four Freedoms speech. This presides before a square open-air plaza, what Kahn called “the room”, defined on facing sides by a series of 6ft by 6ft by 12ft-high granite blocks spaced one inch apart.
“Kahn was very aware of the fact that Roosevelt is considered the architect of the UN,” says Gina Pollara, the executive director of the park who oversaw its building from the schematic plans Khan produced a year before his death. She describes this “room” as Kahn's interpretation of a Greek temple as well as of the UN as an organisation of individual member states that compose something larger. “Roosevelt used to say that all the problems of the world could be solved sitting around a dining room table talking.”
The disguise of truth
Ai Weiwei’s Camouflage is part of a new public art commission programme at Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island
© Ai Weiwei. Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry, courtesy of Camber Studio
Now Ai’s camouflage fabric will cover the room and cast dappled light on visitors, prompting considerations of “what needs protection and what requires the removal of disguise to reveal truth”, the artist says. Inside the tenting, LED lights spell out a proverb in Ukrainian that means: “Wars that bring misery to some may be ‘dear mothers’ to others.” Ai has also collaborated with the artist-run organisation For Freedoms that is providing ribbons printed with each of the Four Freedoms, on which people can write their own messages. These will be affixed to the camouflage netting during the exhibition.
Ai's cat motif was inspired in part by seeing the outdoor Cat Sanctuary & Wildlife Rehabilitation Center just outside the entrance to the Four Freedoms park. In human disasters such as wars, pandemics and environmental crises, “cats are among the first to suffer”, Ai says, seeing them as emblematic of life's most innocent and easily manipulated.
Embedded somewhere within his camouflage pattern is a single dog, which eagle-eyed viewers can have fun trying to find. “It is not only playful but also symbolic,” Ai says. “Among all the animals we love, there are different kinds. If we cannot allow those who are different to exist, civilisation itself would cease to exist.”
- Ai Weiwei: Camouflage, 10 September-10 November, Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island, New York