The Guardian

Pixelated with Lego: Ai WeiWei’s new take on Monet’s water lilies

Caroline Davies Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs until 30 July

Claude Monet’s monumental triptych Water Lilies 1914-26, part of a series depicting lily ponds, will take on new meaning in a re-creation by the artist and activist Ai Weiwei in his forthcoming London exhibition.

The brushstrokes used by the French impressionist to paint water and reflected landscapes are replaced by about 650,000 studs of Lego bricks in a 15-metre-long (50ft) work at the centre of Ai’s biggest UK show in eight years, opening next month.

Titled Water Lilies #1, it is the largest Lego artwork by the celebrated global artist since he first adopted the medium in 2014 to produce portraits of political prisoners. It will span the entire length of a wall in the gallery at the Design Museum in Kensington, west London, where the exhibition opens on 7 April.

In the original masterpiece Monet depicts one of the lily ponds in the gardens of his home in Giverny, near Paris. Though his works are seen as a celebration of the natural world, the pond and gardens were man-made, designed and created by Monet himself at the turn of the 20th century. The artist even had the nearby Epte River partially diverted.

In re-creating the famous scene, Ai aims to challenge ideas of reality and beauty, replacing brushstrokes with the “depersonalised language of industrial parts and colours”, according to the museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk. He says: “Pixel-like blocks suggest contemporary digital technologies which are central to modern life, and in reference to how art is often disseminated in the contemporary world.”

Ai has intensified the colours, compared with the original. He has also personalised his version, which arrived at the museum in 10 preassembled panels.

Included on the right-hand side and “brutally puncturing the watery paradise”, says McGuirk, is a dark portal. This is the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, Ai Qing, a poet, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.

Ai says: “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 digitised and pixelated language. Toy bricks as the material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era.”

Water Lilies #1 will be seen alongside another major new Lego artwork by Ai, Untitled (Lego Incident), part of a series of five “fields” where hundreds of thousands of objects will be laid out on the gallery floor. This field comprises thousands of Lego blocks donated by members of the public after Lego briefly refused to sell its products to the artist in 2014.

Another field will use 200,000 porcelain teapot spouts from the Song dynasty dating from AD960-1279.

McGuirk says: “Several of the works in this exhibition capture the destruction of urban development in China over the last two decades. With Water Lilies #1 Ai Weiwei presents us with an alternate vision – a garden paradise.

“On the one hand he has personalised it by inserting the door of his desert childhood home, but on the other he has used 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 show it.”

Other exhibition highlights include works exploring the tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction, such as Ai’s Han dynasty urn emblazoned with a Coca-Cola logo.

A number of examples of Ai’s “ordinary” objects, where he has transformed something useful into something useless but valuable, will also be shown. These include a worker’s hard hat cast in glass, and a sculpture of an iPhone that has been cut out of a jade axe head.

Large-scale Ai Weiwei works will be installed in the museum’s free-toenter spaces as well as outside the building.

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2023-03-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

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