David Gray/Reuters

Around the world, Ai Weiwei, 54, is known as an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party and the most prominent of the hundreds of people who have been detained this year by the government (“Dissident Chinese Artist Is Released,” The New York Times, June 22.) But for a time in the 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Ai was known as something else — a New Yorker.

He took thousands of photographs. Fashion shows. Days at the laundromat. A dress rehearsal for the Metropolitan Opera. Abandoned buildings. Homeless people. SoHo. Friends brushing teeth. An apartment on East Third Street.

Daily life is a theme among the 227 images selected for “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs, 1983-1993.” They were first shown at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in 2009 (“Ai Weiwei’s New York Photos on Display in Beijing,” In Transit, April 9, 2009).

This week, the exhibition opened at the Asia Society Museum in Manhattan, ending uncertainty as to whether it could go on at all while Mr. Ai was in detention. The photographs have never been shown before in New York or anywhere else outside Beijing.

“They’re like a newly discovered archive,” said Melissa Chiu, the director of the museum.

Mr. Ai worked as a street artist while he lived in New York, charging $15 to $25 for a portrait in Times Square. As a photographer, he documented the 1988 Tompkins Square Park disturbance; notable figures like Bill Clinton, Robert Frank and Allen Ginsberg; and other Chinese artists and intellectuals like Wang Ying, a film director, and Tan Dun, a composer. His self-portraits reveal a dissident-to-be in hot-spots-to-be. (“Before Fame, or Jail, Ai Weiwei Was a New York ‘Starving Artist,’ ” City Room, May 13, 2011).

In 1991, though, after a young Chinese artist named Lin Lin was shot while drawing a street portrait, Mr. Ai said his living conditions had been “worse than just about anything you would find in China.” (“ For Chinese Artists, Shattered Dreams Despite Freedom,” Aug. 28, 1991.) Two years later, Mr. Ai returned to China.

“Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs, 1983-1993” is on view at the Asia Society Museum through Aug. 14.