China’s Ai Weiwei pays tribute to Pablo Neruda in Chile painting

A massive painting by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei dedicated to Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda was unveiled on Saturday in Valparaiso, the Chilean port where the poet lived.

Entitled A Pablo (To Pablo), the huge 900-square-metre painting, is the artist’s first for Latin America as a part of the show Of Bridges & Borders.

It shows dark-toned images of the Senkaku Islands, a small East China Sea archipelago, known as the Diaoyus in Chinese, which are at the centre of a bitter territorial dispute between China and Japan.

Chinese marine surveillance vessels regularly patrol what Beijing says are its waters around the islands, prompting accusations of territorial incursions by Tokyo.

On the painting – hung on the facade of what was a local jail, and is now a cultural centre – is a verse of the poem Cabo de Chile by his father, Ai Qing, who dedicated the poem to his friend Neruda.