Ai Weiwei unveils Lego reinterpretations of Monet’s water lilies on display in London

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

The French Impressionist’s inimitable brushstrokes, depicting reflective landscapes, are reinterpreted in a 15-metre-long work composed of around 650,000 studs made of Lego bricks in 22 colours.

The piece, titled Water Lilies #1, will run the length of one of the gallery walls at the Design Museum in Kensington, west London.

Ai’s design-led inaugural exhibition opens on Friday April 7th and runs through July 30th.

About the work, Ai said: “Without a personal narrative, the artistic narrative 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 concrete experiences in a digitized and pixelated language.

The first design-led exhibition opens on Friday April 7th and runs through July 30th

Speaking of the work, Ai said, “Toy bricks as a material, with their strength properties and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly evolving era where human consciousness is constantly fragmenting.”

The French Impressionist’s inimitable brushstrokes, depicting reflective landscapes, are reinterpreted in a 15-metre-long work composed of around 650,000 studs made of Lego bricks in 22 colours

“Toy building blocks as a material, with their solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly evolving era in which human consciousness is constantly splitting.”

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 explored the medium to produce portraits of political prisoners in 2014 and will form the center of Weiwei’s largest exhibition in the UK in eight years.

Ai, who was born in China but now lives in the Portuguese countryside, said: “Our world is complex and is bursting into an unpredictable future. It is crucial for individuals to find personalized language to express their experiences of these challenging conditions. Personalized expression emerges from identification with history and memories while creating a new language and narrative.

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

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

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

For his version, Ai has used Lego bricks to “remove Monet’s brushstrokes in favor of a depersonalized language of industrial parts and colors”.

The museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk, said: “These pixelated blocks suggest contemporary digital technologies central to modern life and relate to how art is often circulated in today’s world.”

To the right of the piece and “violently piercing the aquatic paradise” is a dark portal, McGuirk said.

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

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

Ai said, “Without a personal narrative, the artistic narrative 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 concrete experiences in a digitized and pixelated language.

It is part of a series of five sprawling “fields” that will have hundreds of thousands of objects spread 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 their products to him in 2014.

Another consists of 200,000 Song Dynasty porcelain teapot spouts from 960-1279 AD.

McGuirk said: “Some of the works in this exhibition show 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 garden paradise.

“On the one hand, he personalized it by including the door of his childhood home in the desert, but on the other hand, he used an industrial language of modular Lego bricks. This is a monumental, complex and powerful work and we are proud to be the first museum to display it.”

Other exhibition highlights include numerous objects and artworks from Ai’s career that explore the tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, and construction and destruction.

Also shown are several examples of Ai’s “common” objects, where he has turned 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 open spaces, and outside the building.