The Ai Weiwei LEGO Artwork is made of 650,000 LEGO bricks
Recreating Oscar-Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei LEGO artwork Water Lilies #1 is set to showcase at the artist’s Making Sense exhibition at London’s Design Museum. The piece is Ai’s take on Monet’s triptych that was designed between 1914 and 1926.
“Our world is complex and collapsing towards an unpredictable future,” said Ai in a statement. “It’s crucial for individuals to find a personalized language to express their experience of these challenging conditions. Personalized expression arises from identifying with history and memories while creating a new language and narrative. Without a personal narrative, artistic narration loses its quality.”
At the centerpiece of the Making Sense exhibition lies the Ai Weiwei LEGO artwork that’s measured at approximately 50 feet long and is composed of 650 000 LEGO pieces colored in 22 different hues. Ai’s newest work is a part of his first design-focused exhibition, which will debut next month and will become his biggest UK exhibition in the last eight years.
“In Water Lilies #1, I integrate Monet’s Impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the east, and concrete experiences of my father and me into a digitized and pixelated language,” Ai added. “Toy bricks as the material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era where human consciousness is constantly dividing.”
The exhibition will feature works from every phase of Ai’s artistic career. According to the Design Museum’s website, it will be the first to showcase Ai’s work “as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values” and explores tensions between “past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction.”
Catch the Ai Weiwei LEGO artwork at the Making Sense exhibition running from April 7 through July 30.
