Ai Weiwei Takes on Monet’s ‘Water-Lilies’ in Lego At The Design Museum
By Natasha Long
Ai Weiwei has just unveiled a new piece, a response to Claude Monet’s celebrated Water-Lilies triptych of 1914-26, which reimagines the monumental Impressionist masterpiece through the use of Lego bricks. The artist began his relationship with Lego as a medium in 2014, using it to make portraits of prisoners. In 2015, he accused the company of censoring his work after its refusal to provide the artist with a bulk order for the continuation of the project which, ultimately, was brought about by enthusiasts of Ai’s work who donated their own Lego pieces. As Ai’s largest Lego work to date, using around 650,000 bricks in twenty-two colours, Water Lilies #1 will be featured in his upcoming exhibition at the Design Museum, London, entitled Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, beginning on 7th April. The exhibition will focus on design, with Lego as a medium commenting on the role played within it of man-made materials and the material culture of the past and present, along with the hand and the machine, preciousness and worthlessness, construction and deconstruction.
Ai Weiwei, Water Lilies #1 (2022), Lego bricks. Image: Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio
Ai chose to engage with Monet’s painting in order to challenge constructions of beauty. Water-Lilies was created in the final stages of the artist’s life and depicts the tranquil lily ponds in his gardens in Giverny, in North-Western France. The monumental scale enables the viewer to become immersed in the natural beauty of Monet’s colours. Notably, however, Monet’s gardens were man-made, designed by the artist himself to his own ideal – he even had the local River Epte diverted during construction. Ai explores this disruption of the natural to personal creative ends, his Lego landscape referring the viewer to the industrial processes inherent to Monet’s impression of a seemingly organic one. Ai follows Monet’s lead in scale, too – the piece is 15m long and spans the gallery’s wall – but reimagines the work with brighter, more arresting colours.
Claude Monet’s Water-Lilies (1914-26, oil on canvas) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Image: Kena Betancur/VIEWpress (forbes.com)
Known as an artist and an activist, Ai Weiwei’s work is informed by his personal experiences in China. Water Lilies #1 is a prime example of this. On the right-hand side of the work we can see the suggestion of a dark threshold ‘brutally puncturing the watery paradise’, according to the museum’s chief curator Justin McGuirk. It represents the entrance to an underground dugout in Xinjiang where Ai’s father, Ai Qing, was forced to live in exile in the 1960s. The artist has connected this with his aim of combining his family’s experiences – reflected in history – with a digitised language to create the personal, narrative tone that runs through his work. He states that “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” .
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense will end on 30th July.
Bibliography
Caroline Davies, ‘Ai Wewei’s Lego Reimagining of Monet’s Water Lilies to Go On Show In London’, The Guardian, March 20, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/mar/20/ai-weiwei-lego-re-imagining-of-monet-water-lilies-to-go-on-show-in-london
Christiana Lamb, ‘Ai Weiwei: ‘It’s a miracle that the Chinese let me stay alive’’. The Sunday Times, March 26, 2023. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a2e732c0-c811-11ed-9386-0ff7738b71b1?shareToken=123acd60b2f808e4306928702b7d1537
David Sanderson, ‘Ai Weiwei’s ‘censored’ Lego Sculpture to Go On Show At Design Museum’, The Times, January 30 2023. Ai Weiwei’s ‘censored’ Lego sculpture to go on show at Design Museum (thetimes.co.uk) MoMA. Claude Monet, Water Lilies 1914-26. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80220
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense. The Design Museum. https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ai-weiwei-making-sense