© Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio
If you don’t know who Ai Weiwei is, he’s an artist who likes big, statement-setting installations, but in a new exhibition he is throwing it back to the Impressionists, with a massive interpretation of Water Lillies by Monet, made from 650,000 Lego bricks.
Titled Water Lillies #1, it’s the largest Lego sculpture the Chinese artist has ever made, and it will go on display in “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” at the Design Museum in London, UK, from April 7 to July 30.
The ne arly fifty-foot-long sculpture takes up a whole wall at the museum. The gentle flowing colors are interrupted suddenly by a dark portal that represents the underground tunnel built by his father at the family house in China’s Xinjiang Province—where they would often hide from the authorities.
“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 said in a statement.
“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.”
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© Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio
Ai has worked with Lego many times before. In his exhibition “The Human Comedy” on San Giorgio Island in the Venice Lagoon, Lego portraits of monsters and animals showed how similar the two can look at various resolutions.
In “Making Sense” Ai has prepared some other massive installations, including one made from 200,000 pieces of broken pottery from the Beijing workshop he used to run before the Communist Party demolished it.
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