The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Liu Ye / Sperone Westwater

Liu Ye's 'Birds' (2011) is part of a gallery show in New York.

Beijing's Liu Ye has made his mark with modest-sized, bright-hued paintings of childlike figures, his favorite cartoon character Miffy the bunny and works inspired by his art hero, Dutch-born abstract artist Piet Mondrian.

But now and then, Mr. Liu, one of China's most prominent contemporary painters, likes to make a bigger statement.

He's done that in "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway," at New York's Sperone Westwater gallery. The title's name comes from the show's centerpiece, a just-finished painting that's roughly 21 feet by 30 feet. His largest work to date, it includes bamboo imagery as well as nods to Mondrian, one of whose nonrepresentational classics is called "Broadway Boogie Woogie."

Trained as a muralist at Beijing's prestigious Chinese Academy of Fine Art, then in Berlin, Mr. Liu started working on "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway" last year in a friend's studio on Broadway and later moved it to the gallery, where visitors would see him working. The artist interprets the grass, a classic subject in Chinese art, to create a grid-like abstraction that also suggests a landscape, often considered the apex of Asian ink painting.

"What I do is about painting and art history. Chinese aesthetics have a traditional system, history, very high quality and taste, different from Western taste but quite meaningful in our time," says Mr. Liu, born in 1964.

His art remains highly coveted in Asia. In December 2010, "Baishi Knew Mondrian" sold at Beijing's Poly International Auction for $4.4 million, very likely to a local buyer. The work depicts a much-revered modern Chinese master artist who worked in ink and died in the 1950s. Last October at Sotheby's in Hong Kong, "Portrait of Qi Baishi" sold for US$1.8 million.

Art adviser Jehan Chu of Vermillion Art Collections in Hong Kong says Mr. Liu's most sought-after paintings "are from the mid-to-late 1990s and feature nautical-themed cherubs posing against sweeping battleship or theater-themed backdrops." In November at Christie's Hong Kong, "Blue Sea," with one of Mr. Liu's trademark sailor boys, went for $1.8 million.

Sperone Westwater would not disclose prices for its show, which will have seven works—including older, more typical small pieces that usually trade in the $500,000 range, and new paintings like the 8-by-10-inch "Birds." Classic Northern European painting inspired that work, Mr. Liu says. "I love Flemish paintings—small, but the idea is huge. I like making small paintings because I need to use my mind. But I also love large paintings because they are physical." The exhibition closes Oct. 27.

—Alexandra A. Seno

By LEE LAWRENCE

New York

The most exciting shows are often those that break new ground or introduce the unfamiliar. “Chinese Gardens: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats” does neither. We expect to see water swirling amid craggy rocks, mountains dissolving into mist, robed figures lingering under gnarled pine trees, birds perched on a flowering branch—and we do. And if we take the time, we really do. By limiting the selection to a single theme, the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian department, Maxwell Hearn, offers us an irresistible opportunity to explore ways of seeing Chinese art and to do so with almost 100 works from a premier collection: the Met’s own.

The texts and audio prove effective allies in understanding context and ferreting out political, social and religious references. Take the 10th- to early 12th-century “Palace Banquet,” the oldest painting in the show. It depicts the imperial women’s quarters as a harmonious setting for an outdoor celebration. But why is a woman standing by a slumbering form, clapping her hands? And why are attendants about to open the gate? The allusion, the label tells us, is to an eighth-century consort famous for sleeping all day and burning the midnight oil with her lover, the emperor. When an uprising threatened the empire, courtiers thought the emperor ought to reserve his energies for governing and forced him to execute his consort. This happy palace scene thus doubles as a warning against rulers placing affairs of the heart above those of state.

Yet there is the danger of getting so carried away deciphering content that we forget to experience these works as art. Indeed, one of the show’s greatest pleasures is its variety of forms, each inviting a distinct approach. The verticality of hanging scrolls like “Palace Banquet” guides the eye from bottom up. We stand outside looking in, slowly piecing the scene and story together. It is similar to the way we approach “Returning Home Through the Snow” (c. 1455), except that in Dai Jin’s hanging scroll we enter the picture through a single figure. We take in his downcast eyes and furrowed brow and, in the artist’s quick brushstrokes, we feel the winter wind whipping his thin robe. As our eye moves up to tree branches outlined in snow, to an expanse of empty sky and distant bare mountains, the chill of this man’s lonely walk engulfs us.

By contrast, other hanging scrolls feature tiny, anonymous figures that draw us inside the scene. We climb the mountain path that stretches before them, glide along the twisting river, brush against low-hanging branches, feel our heart rate slow as we marvel at the scenery. This is similar to the way we experience horizontal handscrolls. One of the oldest forms of painting in China, they are meant to be unfurled from right to left. Short scrolls can be viewed in their entirety, but the long ones—of which the show offers fine examples—invite us to journey through them in stages, each about an arm’s length.

Since no museum could ever allow us to actually do that, we have to emulate the experience by blocking our view (hands up like blinders on a horse works—don’t worry, nobody is looking). When we experience Zhao Cangyun’s “Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao Entering the Tiantai Mountains” (late 13th-early 14th century) this way, we discover just how clever Zhao’s composition is. Like all handscrolls, his begins with an expanse of beautiful silk. This is the “moat,” whose purpose is akin to that of sorbet between courses—it cleanses our mind of whatever occupied it before. First comes a block of text, which a label beneath helpfully translates. It relates the tale of two men who set off to gather medicinal herbs; we next see two elderly gentlemen, a basket to the ready. For two more scenes, text precedes image, priming us for the sight of “green peaks, lofty and contorted” and a stream in need of crossing. We watch the men wade in—then, suddenly, in the next scene, two beautiful women appear on the opposite bank. This time, Zhao has delayed the explanatory text, so we share the men’s surprise.

This way of engaging handscrolls also brings out the beauty and power of nonnarrative paintings. A seemingly repetitive composition like Wang Yuanqi’s 1711 “Wangchuan Villa” morphs into discrete scenes of startling variety. Meanwhile Fang Congyi’s 14th-century “Cloudy Mountains” begins with a geology so vibrant it seems to still be shifting. Yet as we move forward, diagonal lines propel us on a journey that paradoxically builds in intensity even as the landscape’s details dissolve into mist. By the time we reach the expanse of space at the end of the painting, some deep part of us registers what our eyes can’t see: that there is form in this emptiness.

On a lighter note, we can’t help but imagine how the rhythmic waving of a fan might animate trees and birds painted on its surface. Or visualize how the play of light might bring alive deep carvings on a wood brush-holder or ivory table screen. Or contemplate how revealing the album format can be. Wen Zhengming’s ostensibly modest “Garden of the Inept Administrator” (1551) forces viewers to savor, page by page, his poetry, calligraphy and painting. The Met even provides the perfect setting for such musings: the adjoining Astor Court, modeled after a 17th-century Chinese garden, complete with mock pavilion, greenery and evocative rocks.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., opened last November to good reviews—mostly. But some critics zoomed in on a big failing: the absence of top works by artists of the postwar period, when American art marched to the front of the international stage.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Mark Rothko's 'No. 210/No. 211 (Orange).'

Now Crystal Bridges, lavishly financed by Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton, has filled one major gap with the purchase of a 1960 painting by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, "No. 210/No. 211 (Orange)." An example of his most prized works, it has been shown publicly only twice and has been in a private Swiss collection since the mid-1960s. "Each orange has a different glow—it's very vibrant," says museum director Don Bacigalupi.

He declined to disclose the price tag, but Marc Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, pegged it at about $25 million.

Rothko works have been selling well. One of Sotheby's anchors in its big New York fall auction series will be the 1954 "No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)," which it expects to sell for at least $35 million. Last May, his fiery "Orange, Red, Yellow," from 1961, fetched a record $86.9 million at Christie's, way past its high presale estimate of $45 million. Crystal Bridges looked seriously at that painting, though Mr. Bacigalupi declined to say whether the museum bid. When the opportunity to buy "No. 210/No. 211" came along, in a private deal brokered by Christie's, the museum jumped. (The unusual numbering is Rothko's own.)

The public will first see the painting on Oct. 13, at the opening of a special exhibition, "See the Light: The Luminist Tradition in American Art." The show focuses on artists' use of light, starting with the mid-19th century landscape "luminists" and continuing through American Impressionists and modernists like Rothko and Dan Flavin to contemporary artists like James Turrell. When that show closes on Jan. 28, the Rothko will join the permanent-collection galleries.

Mr. Bacigalupi says that he'll use the Rothko purchase as an opportunity to rethink the display of the museum's postwar galleries. In fact, they and other galleries have already changed since the opening, as the museum has added works. They include an early glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly; paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, Theodore Roszak and Miriam Schapiro; and a collection of 466 American prints and drawings that includes images by Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Reginald Marsh, Charles Sheeler and James Abbot MacNeill Whistler, assembled over 30 years by a European.

—Judith H. Dobrzynski

By A.J. GOLDMANN

Berlin

This city's revered Old Masters, a trove of more than 3,000 paintings that includes masterworks by Caravaggio, Bruegel, Titian and Vermeer, has collided with a planned gift of 20th-century art that the city may be in danger of losing.

Ever since June 12, when the German Parliament voted to allocate €10 million ($12.8 million) to retrofit the building now housing the Gemäldegalerie—Berlin's Painting Gallery—for the city's collection of 20th-century art, the proposal has sparked heated debate among art historians, conservators and museum directors world-wide.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin)/Maximilian Meisse

The Gemäldegalerie—Berlin's Painting Gallery

In 2010, Heiner and Ulla Pietzsch promised to donate to Berlin their $190 million collection of about 150 Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist works on the condition that it be integrated into the city's collection of 20th-century art. It has been widely reported that the Pietzsch donation was also made on the condition that the collection be put fully on display, a stipulation that Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's State Museums, denies. Mr. Pietzsch's intention was to help "the state museums finally get a gallery for the 20th century," Mr. Parzinger explained in an interview.

Even before any Pietzsch additions, Berlin's 20th-century art collection had already outgrown Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery, built in 1968. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation thought it had a solution to that space crunch: relocating the Old Masters and the Gemäldegalerie to Museum Island, Berlin's famed consortium of museums and a Unesco World Heritage Site, thus freeing up for modern art their former quarters in the area known as the Kulturforum. "It's not ust for the Pietzsch collection. It's for our whole collection," Mr. Parzinger claimed.

But in the German press, the plan has been represented as a clash between the old and the new, pitting Rembrandt and Leonardo against Jackson Pollock and Joseph Beuys. According to an Aug. 29 interview with the German wire service DPA, Mr. Pietzsch is dismayed with the resulting controversy and has threatened to withdraw his gift if a viable plan is not proposed by early next year.

"Speaking for myself, this has never been a battle between the ancients and the moderns," said Jeffrey Hamburger, a professor of German art at Harvard who has started an online petition against the planned move. Mr. Hamburger and the more than 13,000 others who have signed the petition fear that many Old Masters currently on display would go into storage for a decade or more, since the existing venue proposed for their relocation, the Bode Museum, which now houses the city's Sculpture Gallery, is too small to accommodate both collections.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Hamburger said that he is not categorically opposed to reuniting the painting and sculpture collections on Museum Island. He also agreed that Berlin needs more room for 20th-century art than the New National Gallery can provide. It was there that the Pietzsches' collection was shown in 2009. The success of that exhibition convinced the couple to donate its works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Pollock, Mark Rothko and others to Berlin. While well-heeled collectors in the U.S. sometimes decide to build their own museums, such arrangements are less common in Europe, where there is traditionally stronger government support for museums.

When Berlin was divided, so were its art collections. It was only in 1998 that a new museum opened to house the complete Picture Gallery in the Kulturforum, which had been laid out during the Cold War as a Western analogue to Museum Island, 2½ miles away in what was then East Germany. Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation officials say that keeping the Pietzsches happy has nothing to do with the planned move, which they call a realization of a longstanding wish to bring the Gemäldegalerie back to Museum Island.

Mr. Hamburger counters: "This is an idea that was floated [after reunification], that did not succeed, and that has continued to remain an idée fixe among certain past and present members of the foundation. But to speak of a plan is, I think, almost farcical."

But Mr. Parzinger insists that the move was always part of the "intellectual master plan" of Museum Island. The foundation wants to build a museum across from the Bode, on land owned by the Ministry of Culture that contains 19th-century army barracks, to house the collection of Northern European Art. Mr. Parzinger called it a "natural expansion" for the Bode Museum, put the cost of the new structure at €150 million, and said they might start building in 2017 or 2018.

"This new building will solve the problems of the three collections. It will allow the Old Masters and the sculptures to be shown together. It will allow at the Kulturforum a building to become available for the presentation of the modern collection," said Julien Chapuis, director of the Sculpture Gallery in an interview at the Bode.

Formerly the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the Bode was built in 1904 to house the city's painting and sculpture collections and reopened in 2006 after a seven-year renovation. It now bears the name of its first director, Wilhelm von Bode, who was immensely influential in his display philosophy, which included mixed-media installations and period rooms.

Last year, the Bode assembled a blockbuster show, "The Renaissance Portrait," which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For Mr. Chapuis, the success of that exhibition, which displayed paintings and sculptures in tandem, is a compelling argument for integrating the two collections. But Mr. Hamburger said that the show, which included loans from the Uffizi and the Louvre, said more about "the logic of blockbuster exhibitions."

Uniting the collections on the island may also have to do with the low attendance rates at both institutions, which receive 250,000 visitors each annually. But Mr. Parzinger believes that the Old Masters deserve a home on Museum Island, where they will complete the survey of art from antiquity to the 19th-century and create a Berlin "Louvre" out of collections that were, for historical reasons, unable to be displayed together.

Berlin now has more than a billion euros of backlogged cultural construction projects. On Museum Island alone, those continuing or slated for the next several years include the controversial rebuilding of the Hohenzollern Palace, a new visitor center and extensive renovations at the Pergamon Museum.

These projects are part of the reconstruction of the city since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mr. Chapuis said that the achievements of the past 23 years make him optimistic. "Nowhere else in Europe has there been more public money invested in cultural projects," he said. Mr. Parzinger said that the Gemädlegalerie would not close until there is concrete plan, and added that the foundation hopes to put as few artworks into storage as possible, partially in response to the controversy: "If we have this interim, it has to be for a very short span of years. My colleagues at the Bode say that they can show about 50% of both collections together. If we can find another [temporary] space and, in the end, can show up to 70% or 80% for a few years, then I think we can do this."

But for Mr. Hamburger, good intentions aren't enough. He said that moving "one of world's very greatest collections" required a realistic proposal that is, as of yet, lacking. "Given the German reputation for planning and efficiency, it's just unbelievable," he said.

He insisted that a collection that was "largely hidden from view for half a century" should not be allowed to go into storage after 14 years. "This is a collection that has seen more than its share of bad luck and been a political pawn for far too long. It should be treated with greater respect."

Mr. Goldmann writes about European arts and culture. He lives in Berlin.

By JULIE V. IOVINE

Venice

People are more familiar with the Venice art and film festivals and all the swellegance that goes along with celebrity artists and actors going to and fro by water taxi, but every other year there is an architecture biennale as well.

All the major players show up here too, but the mood is perhaps more earnest than glamorous. This year it was particularly so at the opening in late August as the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale laid bare a profession wrestling with its demons and a deeper dread that the public considers it irrelevant. "All good architects think they are making a contribution to society," said David Chipperfield, the 2012 director and the architect of such quietly resonant works as the 2009 rebuilding of the Neues Museum in Berlin. "Why does society think that architects are just a bunch of profiteering egotistical joyriders?"

Marco Zanta

This year's biennale explored the theme of 'common ground.' The Russian pavilion; and

This year's theme, Common Ground, was chosen by Mr. Chipperfield to be widely inclusive, and it was interpreted in almost as many ways as there were architects, curators, photographers and design editors involved—some 119 overall, presiding over 69 installations.

At the main exhibition in the vast Arsenale with its towering brick columns—where the Venetian fleet was built at the rate of one ship a day in the 16th century—and at the more than 30 national pavilions that complement the exhibition in the sprawling and dusty public gardens, three disparate notes reverberate insistently: design from the bottom up; the mysterious sources of architectural inspiration; and the art of building.

Design from the bottom up is a movement gaining momentum. Sometimes called "tactical urbanism," it is about communities taking matters into their own hands and building what they want and need—a response to frustration with architecture seen merely as expensive decoration, not effective problem-solving.

The best example in Venice is the replica of a squatter's bar plonked in the middle of the Arsenale. By the Venezuelan architects Urban-Think Tank, the installation re-creates a corner of an uncompleted office building in Caracas abandoned by developers during the financial crisis. The building is now occupied by some 750 families who have improvised markets, shops, apartments and restaurants—breaking through concrete and throwing up walls of the cheapest materials on hand. The replica café, complete with slap-dash brickwork, ice-cold cervezas and blasting television set, has become both a go-to meeting place and the site of impassioned debate about what architecture is and isn't.

Marco Zanta

The Caracas bar, known as 'View of Torre David,' by Urban-Think Tank.

With a slicker installation, the USA pavilion sends the same message of community empowerment. More than 100 color-coded roller shades have been feathered across the ceilings, each describing an instance of citizens in action. Among the stories: how a roving hipster flea market revitalized an empty warehouse and how volunteers "de-paved" an abandoned parking lot and planted trees.

And elsewhere at the biennale, a video tells the story of Tempelhof airport in Berlin, closed down in 2008. With the local government still fussing over development plans, the airport has been taken over by Berliners who have planted vegetable gardens, turned runways into skateboard tracks and generally transformed the formerly vital Cold War hub into a people's parade ground.

The sections of Common Ground dealing with architectural inspiration are more cerebral—but also more intriguing for those who believe in design as something more premeditated than spontaneous.

British architect Zaha Hadid pays tribute to Frei Otto, a German engineer famous for innovative tensile structures, with her own elasticizing lily-shaped form emanating from a complex marriage of old mathematical and new digital formulas. And another London firm, FAT, has installed a cabin-size rubber cast of one of the most copied buildings on earth, Palladio's Villa Rotunda. On a more personal scale, New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien—fresh from successfully relocating and expanding the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia—have invited 34 architects and friends to fill small trunks and mail them to Venice. From the rocks painted with graffiti messages that Japanese architect Toyo Ito recovered from a tsunami-ravaged village to U.S. architect Steven Holl's frayed copy of Paul Celan's "Last Poems," the opened trunks offer some revealing glimpses into the designing mind.

Marco Zanta

Zaha Hadid's 'Arum.'

The biennale's least controversial and most easy to admire installations, by far, are about the art of building. Anupama Kundoo, a young architect from India, has painstakingly rebuilt to scale her own house in South India with the help of Venetian, Australian and Indian craftspeople and students—down to cleverly made vaults formed from stacked plastic cups and coffers from inverted clay bowls. Almost 15 feet long, Darryl Chen's exquisite ink hand drawing in the style of an ancient Chinese scroll—at the British pavilion—depicts a village outside Beijing being developed by local artisans and peasants, another bottom-up project, dubbed by the artist as "an atypical new socialist village."

The upbeat celebration of influence and craftsmanship could not, however, drown out the persistent anxiety that the profession is feeling. The dire economics of being an architect today are demonstrated graphically by a group of unemployed architects from Spain—where half of all architectural practices in Madrid and Barcelona have folded—hired for the duration of the biennale to hold up models of buildings commissioned and built in the premeltdown boom years.

Those years witnessed a glorious flowering of architectural monuments, from Frank Gehry's radiant Disney Hall in Los Angeles to Norman Foster's reconstitution of the Reichstag in Berlin. And yet, if this year's biennale is the measure of anything it is that the time for showboat buildings is well past and that architects themselves are the most eager to move on and build for the everyday world where people really live. It's about time.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

By CHAD BRAY

The artist behind the "Hope" poster that became a symbol of President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was sentenced on Friday to two years of probation and 300 hours of community service for lying during a copyright dispute involving the iconic image.

Reuters

Shepard Fairey on Friday in New York

Shepard Fairey, who also was ordered by the judge to pay a $25,000 fine to the government, in February admitted to fabricating documents and lying in a civil lawsuit he had brought against the Associated Press in 2009, after the news agency accused him of violating its copyrights. The news agency said Mr. Fairey had used a close-up AP photograph taken of Mr. Obama at a 2006 event as the basis for his poster—a red, white and blue image of Mr. Obama with the word "Hope" underneath.

Mr. Fairey had claimed that he used a different photo as the basis, but when he realized that wasn't true, prosecutors said, he created false documents and deleted electronically stored documents to hide the fact that he had indeed used the 2006 image as a reference.

"I am deeply ashamed and remorseful that I didn't live up to my own standards of honesty and integrity," Mr. Fairey said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

The 42-year-old Mr. Fairey had faced as much as six months in prison after pleading guilty in February to a single misdemeanor count of criminal contempt. Prosecutors, who sought jail time in the case, said anything less would send "a terrible message" to people who might commit similar conduct in the future.

But Daniel Gitner, Mr. Fairey's lawyer, said his client shouldn't serve any jail time because he had admitted his misconduct as soon as it was discovered and well before the government's investigation began. He also undertook efforts to settle the case and make the AP whole, despite having a valid argument on which he may have prevailed at trial in his lawsuit, Mr. Gitner said.

In a statement after the hearing, Mr. Fairey said: "My wrong-headed actions, born out of a moment of fear and embarrassment, have not only been financially and psychologically costly to myself and my family, but also helped to obscure what I was fighting for in the first place—the ability of artists everywhere to be inspired and freely create art without reprisal."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas said the artist could seek to end his probation after a year's time if he completes the community service by then.

As part of last year's settlement of the civil lawsuit, AP was paid $1.6 million, a portion of which came from insurance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Levy said.

"We hope this case will serve as a clear reminder to all of the importance of fair compensation for those who gather and produce original news content," Gary Pruitt, AP's president and chief executive, said Friday.

Write to Chad Bray at chad.bray@wsj.com

Art Under Assault

'Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962'|
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Oct. 6-Jan. 14

The premise of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is deceptively simple: The show surveys nearly 100 canvases that have been assaulted, creatively, by their makers—either by scarring, ripping, cutting or burning—during the unsettling years after World War II.

The museum says that by upending the traditional idea of the canvas as a window-pane-like portal into a faraway world, these artists collectively transformed painting into sculpture—a mixed-media move that artists have been grappling with ever since.

Expect plenty of unusual materials to pop up in these pieces, including the canvas, welded steel and wire constructions that animate Lee Bontecou's abstracts, such as the above untitled work from 1962.

There are also smashed glass bottles embedded in Shozo Shimamoto's lime-colored "Cannon Picture" from 1956 and bits of fur stuck within Kazuo Shiraga's red 1963 abstract, "Wildboar Hunting."

—Kelly Crow

courtesy of the artist

'Map of China'

Mr. Ai Goes to Washington

'Ai Weiwei: According to What?'
Oct. 7-Feb. 24,
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington

Artist Ai Weiwei has become exponentially visible in recent years for his social activism, amplified by his well-documented travails with the Chinese government. But opportunities to actually see the art by which Mr. Ai first made his name have been limited.

"According to What?," the first major survey in the United States of Mr. Ai's work, opens Oct. 7 at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The show later travels to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Pérez Art Museum Miami and Brooklyn Museum.

"According to What?" originated in 2009 at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, curated by chief curator Mami Kataoka. It includes early work of Mr. Ai's, such as his "New York Photographs" (1983-93, shown at the Asia Society in New York last year); and signature pieces where he reinvents Chinese relics as art objects by destroying them ("Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," 1995/2009, "Coca-Cola Vase," 2007). There's also new work made since the Mori exhibition.

His prolific blog and Twitter activism have raised the ire of the Chinese government. But Mr. Ai's art work also frequently engages with contemporary Chinese social and political issues, (see 'Map of China,' right), commenting on government corruption or mismanagement through metaphor, such as the installation piece "Snake Ceiling," composed of varyingly sized backpacks to represent school children crushed by poor school construction during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

"By doing this retrospective we hope to draw attention back to the art work itself," said Kerry Brougher, Hirshhorn deputy director and chief curator, who organized the Washington show with assistant curator Mika Yoshitake. "It's a real mixture of traditional concepts in Chinese art mixed with contemporary issues that only Ai Weiwei can do."

The Mori and the Hirshhorn began talks about bringing "According to What?" to North America in 2009. By the time Mr. Ai was arrested and detained for 81 days last year by Chinese authorities, the Hirshhorn had already mapped out a floor plan for the exhibition, Mr. Brougher said.

Mr. Ai was prohibited from traveling outside Beijing for a year after his detention. While the probation was lifted earlier this summer, Mr. Ai has said that he is still unable to travel due to further investigations. The Hirshhorn said the artist and his assistants have been asked to come to Washington for the installation of "According to What?"

—Kimberly Chou