Ai Weiwei recreates Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ with LEGO

STORY: The artwork, titled ‘Water Lilies #1’, is one of the center pieces of Ai’s new exhibition at London’s Design Museum. Running under the header ‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’, the design and architecture-focused exhibition is Ai’s biggest UK show in eight years.

Ai, a critic of the Chinese Communist Party who was briefly detained by authorities and spent four years under house arrest for his political activism, said that by re-imagining Monet’s famed landscape he also wanted to pay tribute to his father, poet Ai Qing, who passed away in 1996.

“So they are also my memories with my father. He studied in Paris as an artist in the 1920s and later I and him was exiled. There’s a black door behind me I integrated into this Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ because Monet is an artist my father liked. So this is really a memory piece,” he told Reuters at a press preview.

“Making Sense’ also features another new LEGO artwork by Ai, “Untitled (LEGO Incident”), one of five expansive ‘fields’ featuring hundreds of thousands of objects laid out on the gallery floor.

The exhibition runs at London’s Design Museum from April 7 to July 30.