Ai Weiwei recreates Monet’s water lilies with Lego pieces

(CNN) — When Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opens his new exhibition in April, visitors will be met with a familiar scene at London’s Design Museum: Claude Monet’s famous water lilies. But instead of being made up of the French painter’s impressionist brushstrokes, the monumental recreation is made from 650,000 Lego pieces in 22 different colours.

Titled “Water Lillies #1,” the almost 50-foot-wide work is, according to the museum, the largest Lego work ever made by Ai.

Ai Weiwei’s version depicts the idyllic water lily ponds of Monet’s Giverny home, but includes, on the far right, a “dark portal” alluding to Ai’s childhood in China’s Xinjiang region. The dark Lego patch depicts the door to an underground cave where the artist lived with his father in exile during the 1960s, according to a museum news release.

“In ‘Water Lillies #1’ I integrate Monet’s impressionist painting, which evokes Zen in the Orient, and my father’s and my own concrete experiences in a digitized and pixelated language,” Ai said in a statement. “Toy bricks as a material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era in which human consciousness is constantly divided.”

Ai has used a variety of materials in his installations and conceptual artworks, from ceramics, wood, and porcelain to film, photography, and found objects. In the late 2000s, the artist and activist added Lego bricks to his repertoire.

These colorful and meticulous works include hundreds of portraits of political prisoners and exiles, created by Ai for a 2014 exhibition. The following year, the artist made headlines when Lego turned down his studio’s request to mass order the bricks for a new project, a move he called “censorship” (the Danish company later reversed its decision).

During the controversy, Ai’s fans and members of the public sent him their own Lego bricks, and these donated bricks will also be on display at his new London show in an installation called “Untitled (Lego Incident).”

The exhibition, “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense”It will include other installations created on a colossal scale, including 200,000 porcelain teapot spouts from the Song Dynasty era and thousands of fragments of Ai’s own sculptures that were destroyed when Beijing city authorities demolished his studio in 2018. .

The scale of the Ai installations is “haunting and moving,” the museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk, said in a statement. “And in trying to make sense of these works, the visitor is challenged to think about what we value and what we destroy.”

On “Water Lillies #1”, McGuirk said: “On the one hand, [Ai Weiwei] he has personalized it by inserting the door of his deserted childhood home and, on the other, he has depersonalized it using an industrial language of modular Lego blocks. This is a monumental, complex and powerful work, and we are proud to be the first museum to display it.”

“Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” will be available at the Design Museum in London, UK, from April 7 to July 30.