Artist Ai Weiwei recreates Monet’s water lilies using 650,000 LEGO bricks

When Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opens his new show in April, visitors will find a familiar scene at London’s Design Museum: Claude Monet’s famous water lilies. But rather than being composed of the French painter’s Impressionist brushstrokes, the monumental recreation is made from Lego brick pegs – an impressive 650,000 of them in 22 different colors.

Entitled “Water Lilies #1” the nearly 50-foot-wide piece is the largest Lego work Ai has ever made, according to the museum.

His version depicts the idyllic lily ponds of Monet’s home in Giverny, but includes, on the right side, a “dark portal” alluding to Ai’s childhood in China’s Xinjiang region.

The piece with dark Legos represents the door to an underground shelter where the artist lived with his father in exile during the 1960s, according to a press release from the museum.

“In ‘Water Lilies #1’ I integrate Monet’s impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and my father’s and my own concrete experiences in a digitized, pixelated language,” Ai said in a statement.

“Toy bricks as a material, with its qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing age, where human consciousness is constantly dividing.”

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. new project, a move he described as “censorship” (the Danish company later reversed its decision).

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

The exposure, “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense”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 her Beijing studio was demolished by city authorities in 2018.

The scale of Ai’s installations is “disturbing 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.”

In “Water Lillies #1”, McGuirk said, “On the one hand (Ai Weiwei) personalized it by inserting the door of his childhood home in the desert, and on the other hand, he 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 on view at the Design Museum in London, UK, from April 7th to July 30th.