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He washed them. He ironed creases into the pants, brushed lint off the sweaters, scraped mud out of the sneaker treads.

Now he is bringing 2,046 of these items to New York, where he lived in the 1980s before he became one of the most influential artists of his day and before he spent four years detained by the Chinese government and denied his passport.

The show, “Laundromat,” opening at Deitch Projects’ Wooster Street space on Nov. 5, will present those cleaned castoff belongings, along with photographs of the refugee camps he visited (including some of Mr. Ai’s Instagram shots). It will also include a short documentary about Idomeni, which ends on the image of a pink heart-shaped light, still blinking on the back of a little girl’s shoe, like a beacon of resilience and hope......Continue Reading

Top image: Mr. Ai’s studio in Berlin. The exhibition “Laundromat,” at Deitch Projects, will display migrants’ castoffs. Credit Courtesy of the artist and Ai Weiwei Studio

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