PARIS — On Sunday evening, Ai Weiwei — Chinese dissident artist, human rights activist and, now, European scenester — was holding court on the cosmetics floor of the Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the Paris department store. The event was the invitation-only opening of “Er Xi,” or “Child’s Play,” an exhibit of his work that fills 10 display windows and the store’s atrium through Feb. 20.

Bamboo-and-silk constructions lit from inside and depicting fanciful creatures from Chinese mythology hung in the atrium. A smoke machine pumped atmospheric mist. Pianists played Chopin on grand pianos as waiters passed around Moët Champagne, hot tea and bite-size chocolate éclairs on wooden trays.

Mr. Ai, dressed in an untucked white Oxford shirt and rumpled blue blazer, took a break from greeting fans to say that working in a department store had been liberating. It allowed him to go beyond the white cube of most galleries and use the atrium and window displays in an interesting way, he said, and he liked that passers-by could see his work.

If hyper-popular museums like MoMA have been described as shopping malls — commercial, crowded, loud, impersonal and the opposite of contemplative — then here, paradoxically, was a retailing emporium with art thrown in, and where viewing that art seemed a rather more welcoming and pleasant experience.