Artist Ai Weiwei is known for using LEGO bricks as art materialstaking advantage of the analog bit form of the square building blocks to generate what is known as “aesthetic glitchwhich comment on digital disruption, paranoia around systems, and miscommunication (among other associations related to their topic). In his latest and largest LEGO work to date, slated for an upcoming exhibition at the Design Museum in London, Ai presents ‘Water Lilies #1’, a recreation of Claude Monet’s ubiquitous Impressionist work.
The exhibition Ai Weiwei: Giving meaningwhich opens in April, will present works related to the COVID-19 crisis and takes everyday objects as subject matter and art materials, including toilet paper rolls, a broken Song Dynasty teapot, and hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks.
“Toy bricks as a material, with their solid qualities and deconstructive potential, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing age where human consciousness is constantly splitting,” Ai said in a statement. Plastic bricks have been part of the artist’s vast and varied medium repertoire since the early 2000s.
“Water Lilies #1” is nearly 50 feet wide and features 650,000 LEGO bricks in 22 different colors. The effect, even in pictures, evocatively encapsulates the dreamy aesthetic of Monet’s original work. It includes an additional element, courtesy of Ai – the depiction of a dark doorway creating a suction portal in and out of the mural.
“On the one hand [Ai] personalized it by inserting the door to his childhood home in the desert, and on the other he depersonalized it using an industrial language of modular Lego blocks,” said Design Museum Chief Curator Justin McGuirk. CNN. “It is a monumental, complex and powerful work and we are proud to be the first museum to show it.”
But the artist has had a long and mixed relationship with the iconic building brick company, as his early LEGO works included portraits of political prisoners, content from the 2014 exhibition Trace, which took place on the disused prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. The controversial nature of this subject led the company to decline a future request for bulk bricks when preparing for its major international exhibition. Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, which was due to open at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in December 2015. A passionate defender of freedom of expression, Ai later exposed the toymaker as committing an act of censorship due to their company policy that “the pattern may not contain any political statement”.
“As a powerful corporation, Lego is an influential cultural and political player in the globalized economy with questionable values,” Ai said at the time.
Statements made via Instagram prompted the artist’s fans to donate thousands of LEGO bricks to support his artistic endeavors, and LEGO eventually reversed its stance on selling bricks in bulk to the artist – as evidenced by the more than half a million which will soon be shown to an ever more demanding public.
