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When the Chinese language artist Ai Weiwei opens his new present in April, guests will encounter a well-known scene at London’s Design Museum: Claude Monet’s famed water lilies. However moderately than being composed of the French painter’s Impressionist brushstrokes, the monumental recreation is produced from the studs of Lego bricks — a whopping 650,000 of them in 22 completely different colours, CNN studies.
Titled “Water Lilies #1” the practically 50-foot-wide piece is the most important Lego paintings Ai has ever made, in keeping with the museum.
His model depicts the idyllic lily ponds of Monet’s dwelling in Giverny however contains, on the far right-hand aspect, a “darkish portal” alluding to Ai’s childhood in China’s Xinjiang area. The patch of darkish Legos represents the door to an underground dugout the place the artist lived together with his father in exile through the Sixties, in keeping with a museum press launch.
“In ‘Water Lilies #1’ I combine Monet’s Impressionist portray, paying homage to Zenism within the East, and concrete experiences of my father and me right into a digitized and pixelated language,” Ai stated in a press release. “Toy bricks as the fabric, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, mirror the attributes of language in our quickly creating period the place human consciousness is continually dividing.”
Ai has used a variety of supplies in his installations and conceptual artworks, from pottery, wooden and porcelain to movie, images and located objects. Within the late 2000s, the artist and activist added Lego bricks to his repertoire.
These colourful, meticulous works embody lots of of portraits of political prisoners and exiles, created by Ai for a 2014 exhibition. The next 12 months, the artist made headlines when Lego refused his studio’s request for bulk orders of the bricks for a brand new challenge, a transfer he described as “censorship” (The Danish firm later reversed its determination).
Through the controversy, Ai’s followers and members of the general public despatched him their very own Lego blocks, and these donated bricks will even be displayed at his new London present in an set up known as “Untitled (Lego Incident).”
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