At the Design Museum in London inaugurated the first solo exhibition of Ai Weiwei focuses on design and architecture: “Ai Weiwei, Making Sense”. Among the new works created for the exhibition visitors can admire Water Lilies #1, the reproduction of one of the most famous paintings by Claude Monet composed entirely of LEGO bricks, 650 thousand pieces and 22 different colors, to be precise, for a length of more than 15 meters.

Monet’s brushstrokes have been translated into an impersonal language consisting of industrial pieces and colors. The small Lego bricks, in fact, like pixels, directly refer to contemporary digital technologies. To the right of the version of Weiwei’s work there is a dark portal, which represents the door of the underground dug in the province of Xinjiang where the artist and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the sixties.

Untitled (Lego Incident), part of a series of five vast “fields” in which hundreds of thousands of objects will be placed on the gallery floor. In this particular field, visitors will observe thousands of Lego bricks donated to the artist by people around the world, in response to Lego’s refusal to sell to the artist its products in 2014.

The exhibition will be open until 30 July 2023.