Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is set to exhibit his largest Lego artwork to date, titled "Water Lilies #1," at the Design Museum in London from April 7 to July 30.
The piece is a recreation of Claude Monet's iconic water lilies but made from Lego in 22 different colours, totalling an impressive 650,000 pieces.
Photo © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
The nearly 15.24 metres piece features a dark portal made from dark Legos, which represents a dugout where the artist lived in exile with his father during the 1960s, according to a museum press release.
Photo © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
Ai said the artwork integrates Monet's Impressionist painting with his own concrete experiences, digitised and pixelated using toy bricks. He added that Lego's attributes of solidity and potential for deconstruction reflect the attributes of language in the rapidly developing era of human consciousness.
Photo © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
The exhibition, "Ai Weiwei: Making Sense," will also showcase other installations created on a colossal scale, including 200,000 porcelain spouts from Song dynasty-era teapots and thousands of fragments of Ai's own sculptures that were destroyed when his Beijing studio was demolished by the city's authorities in 2018.
Photo © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
The exhibition will also feature an installation called "Untitled (Lego Incident)," which includes Lego blocks donated by Ai's fans and members of the public. The donated bricks were sent to Ai after Lego refused his studio's request for bulk orders of the bricks for a new project, a move he described as "censorship."
Photo © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
The exhibition's chief curator Justin McGuirk described Ai's installations as "unsettling and moving," and that visitors are challenged to think about what we value and what we destroy when trying to make sense of his works.
The Design Museum is "proud" to be the first museum to showcase "Water Lilies #1," McGuirk added.
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