Ai Weiwei reveals Lego reimagining of Monet’s Water Lilies that will go on display in London

Claude Monet’s world famous Water Lilies 1914 -26 triptych will be recreated by artist Ai Weiwei for his new London exhibition.

The French Impressionist’s inimitable brushstrokes of reflected landscapes are reinvented in a 49-foot work made up of some 650,000 blocks of Lego bricks in 22 colors.

The piece, titled Water Lilies #1, will stretch across one wall of the Design Museum gallery in Kensington, West London.

Ai’s inaugural design-focused exhibition opens Friday, April 7 and runs through July 30.

Speaking of the work, Ai said: ‘Without a personal narrative, artistic storytelling loses its quality. In Water Lilies #1, I integrate Monet’s impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and my father’s and my own concrete experiences in a digitized and pixelated language.

The French Impressionist’s inimitable brushstrokes of reflected landscapes are reinvented in a 49-foot work made up of some 650,000 blocks of Lego bricks in 22 colors.

Speaking about the work, Ai said: “Toy bricks as a 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 divided.”

‘Toy bricks as a material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing age where human consciousness is constantly divided.’

The colors are more intense than in the Monet series and the work arrived at the museum in 10 pre-assembled panels.

It is the artist’s largest Lego artwork since he first took up the medium in 2014 to produce portraits of political prisoners and will form the focus of Weiwei’s largest UK exhibition in eight years.

Ai, who was born in China but now lives in the countryside in Portugal, said: ‘Our world is complex and is collapsing towards an unpredictable future.

“It is crucial that people find a personalized language to express their experience in these challenging conditions. Personalized expression comes from identifying with history and memories while creating a new language and narrative.’

In the original, Monet, who was born in 1840 and died in 1926, brings to life one of the water lily ponds in the gardens of his home in Giverny, in northern France, in a series of paintings that show the artist’s obsession with the water lilies The gardens and the pond were designed and created by Monet himself.

For his version, Ai has used Lego pieces to “remove the Monet brushstrokes in favor of a depersonalized language of industrial pieces and colours”.

The museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk, said: “These pixel-like blocks suggest contemporary digital technologies that are central to modern life and in reference to how art is often disseminated in the contemporary world.”

On the right side of the piece and “brutally piercing the aquatic paradise” is a dark portal, McGuirk said.

According to Ai, this is the door to the underground shelter in Xinjiang where he and his father, the poet Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.

Water Lilies #1 will be seen alongside another major new Lego artwork from Ai, Untitled (Lego Incident).

Water Lilies #1, 2022, by Ai Weiwei. It is the artist’s largest Lego artwork since he first took up the medium in 2014 to produce portraits of political prisoners and will form the center of Weiwei’s largest UK exhibition in eight years.

The colors are more intense than in the Monet series and the work arrived at the museum in 10 pre-assembled panels.

Ai said: ‘Without a personal narrative, artistic storytelling loses its quality. In Water Lilies #1, I integrate Monet’s impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and the concrete experiences of my father and myself in a pixelated, digitized language.

It is part of a series of five expansive ‘fields’ where hundreds of thousands of objects will lie scattered across the gallery floor.

This field is made up of thousands of Lego bricks donated by members of the public after Lego briefly refused to sell it to him in 2014.

Another is made up of 200,000 Song Dynasty porcelain teapots dating from 960-1279 AD.

McGuirk said: ‘Several of the works in this exhibition capture the destruction of urban development in China over the past two decades. With Water Lilies #1, Ai Weiwei presents us with an alternative vision: a paradise garden.

“On the one hand, he has personalized it by inserting the door of his childhood home in the desert, 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 display it.”

Other exhibition highlights include dozens of objects and artworks from Ai’s career, exploring the tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and useless, and construction and destruction. .

Several examples of Ai’s “ordinary” items will also be shown, where he has transformed something useful into something useless but valuable.

Large-scale works by Ai Weiwei will also be installed outside the exhibition gallery, in the museum’s free entry spaces, as well as outside the building.