650,000 Lego pieces to make a copy of Monet's water lilies!

650,000 Lego pieces to make a copy of Monet's water lilies!

Selena Mattei | Mar 22, 2023 3 minutes read 2 comments
 

"Water Lilies #1", which measures almost 15 meters wide, is the largest Lego work ever made by Ai. It will be on view when the new exhibition by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opens in April at the Design Museum in London.

When Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's new show opens in April at London's Design Museum, visitors will see Claude Monet's famous water lilies. But instead of being made of the Impressionist brushstrokes of the French painter, the huge copy is made of the studs of 650,000 Lego bricks in 22 different colors. The museum says that "Water Lilies #1," which is almost 50 feet wide, is the largest Lego piece that Ai has ever made. His version shows the peaceful lily ponds at Monet's home in Giverny, but it also has a "dark portal" on the far right that refers to Ai's childhood in the Xinjiang region of China. A press release from the museum says that the dark Lego patch is the door to an underground dugout where the artist and his father lived in exile in the 1960s.

"In 'Water Lilies #1,' I use a digital and pixelated language to combine Monet's Impressionist painting, which reminds me of Zenism in the East, with my father's and my own real-life experiences," Ai said in a statement. "Toy bricks as the material, with their solidity and ability to be broken down, reflect the qualities of language in our rapidly changing time, when people's minds are always splitting." In his installations and conceptual works, Ai has used a wide range of materials, from pottery, wood, and porcelain to film, photography, and found objects. At the end of the 2000s, the artist and activist began to work with Lego bricks.


Ai made these colorful, detailed pieces for an exhibition in 2014, and many of them are portraits of political prisoners and exiles. The next year, the artist got a lot of attention when Lego turned down a request from his studio to buy a lot of bricks for a new project. He called this "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. These blocks will be part of an installation called "Untitled (Lego Incident)" at his new show in London.

"Ai Weiwei: Making Sense" will feature other large-scale installations, such as 200,000 porcelain teapot spouts from the Song dynasty and thousands of pieces of Ai's own sculptures that were destroyed when his Beijing studio was torn down by the city in 2018. In a statement, the museum's chief curator, Justin McGuirk, said that the size of Ai's installations is "unsettling and moving." "And as the visitor tries to figure out what these works mean, he or she is forced to think about what we value and what we destroy." On "McGuirk said about "Water Lillies #1": "On the one hand, (Ai Weiwei) has made it personal by putting in the door of the desert home he grew up in, and on the other, he has made it impersonal by using a language of modular Lego blocks." We are proud to be the first museum to show this huge, complicated, and powerful piece of art."

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