Ai Weiwei’s Lego recreation of Monet’s water lilies to go live from April 7 in London
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Famous French painter Claude Monet’s Water Lilies panels have been reinterpreted by artist Ai Weiwei in the form of Lego bricks.
Painted between 1914 and 1926, Monet’s original piece, fuelled by his love of his garden and lily ponds, took inspiration from his garden in Giverny, France.
The artwork, which now hangs in the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris, in rooms designed by Monet, is celebrated as an impressionist masterpiece.
Ai recreated the piece with 650,000 Lego bricks, employing the bricks in 22 colours to create a 15m-long piece that will form part of his biggest British show in eight years.
Water Lilies #1 is the Chinese artist’s largest Lego artwork. In 2014, he used the same medium to make portraits of political prisoners.
On the right-hand side of the artwork is a dark portal, which represents the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang where Ai and his poet father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.
Explaining that it is crucial for individuals to find a personalised language to express their experience of challenging conditions, Ai said: “Without a personal narrative, artistic narration loses its quality. In Water Lilies #1, I integrate Monet’s impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the east, and concrete experiences of my father and me into a digitised and pixelated language.”
Toy bricks reflect the attributes of language in a rapidly developing era “where human consciousness is constantly dividing”, he added.
Mr Justin McGuirk, the museum’s chief curator, told The Guardian: “On the one hand, he has personalised it by inserting the door of his desert childhood home. But on the other, he has used an industrial language of modular Lego blocks.”
Ai left China in 2015 and has lived in Cambridge for four years. He developed a close relationship with Downing College and has exhibited at the institution’s Heong Gallery.
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum in London from April 7 to July 30.
Ai recreated the piece with 650,000 Lego bricks, employing the bricks in 22 colours.
PHOTOS: ELA BIALKOWSKA/OKNOSTUDIO
