Years before becoming the loudest voice of political dissent in the Chinese art landscape, 24-year-old Ai Weiwei arrived in a New York City seething with very different tensions from those of his hometown Beijing. His documentation of those years, now on display at the Asia Society through August 14 in Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983 – 1993, reveal a young artist investigating his interests in an unknown city.
     The exhibition is divided roughly in two, with half the photographs showing members of Ai’s inner circle, and half portraying the city’s social wars from a resolutely street-level perspective. This portrait of New York is intimate. Photos of AIDS protests being broken up, ruined Bowery storefronts being taken over by stray dogs, and a diminutive Al Sharpton facing crowds at a Tawana Brawley demonstration all speak to Ai’s devotion to activism while remaining wholly present in the moment. A 1989 series depicting shaggy, joint-smoking protestors in Tompkins Square Park is equally effective as an image of modern American advocacy and as an implicit comparison with the bloody Tiananmen Square protests of the same year.