Forever (2003, Ai Weiwei)

When Ai Weiwei (born 1957, Beijing) was growing up, China’s poor families aspired to own Forever brand bicycles as means of both transportation and socioeconomic mobility. After spending a decade in New York, the artist returned to a radically changed Beijing in 1993, where the bicycle had faded into the past, giving way to cars. “Forever” (2003), presented in the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, is a circular arrangement of 64 Forever bicycles. With no beginning and no end, the sculpture questions whether something eternal can exist in a quickly changing society.

See it in “Megacities Asia” through July 17, 2016: http://bit.ly/1IQc68i #mfaMEGA