Ai Weiwei Recreates Monet's Water Lilies with 650,000 Lego Bricks

Ai Weiwei will unveil his largest Lego work to date at the Design Museum in London as part of his first solo exhibition there, 'Ai Weiwei: Making Sense,' opening April 7, 2023. The piece, 'Water Lilies #1,' uses 650,000 bricks in 22 colors to form a 15-meter-long panel based on Claude Monet's triptych 'Water Lilies' (1914–1926) at MoMA. Weiwei intensifies the colors and adds a dark portal on the right side, representing the bunker door in Xinjiang where he and his father, poet Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s. Curator Justin McGuirk says the work challenges Monet's ideals of beauty and naturalism by replacing oil brushstrokes with the impersonal language of industrial bricks. The exhibition also includes 'Untitled Lego Incident,' an installation collecting all the bricks donated to Weiwei after Lego boycotted him in 2015, refusing to supply bricks for a portrait series at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. That series featured 176 faces of political prisoners and exiles. Other recent Lego works by Weiwei include reproductions of Carpaccio's 'St. George and the Dragon' for the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Giorgione's 'Sleeping Venus' and 'Know Thyself' for Galleria Continua, and Mondrian's compositions for neugerriemschneider. His 2019 work 'Illumination' recreates a photograph of Chinese political agents ambushing him in 2011.