With 650,000 Lego pieces, Ai Weiwei recomposes Claude Monet's Water Lilies

The farandole of figures is prodigious.

Ai Weiwei used 650,000 Lego bricks in 22 different colors to create a work 15 meters long.

Entitled

, it will be exhibited at the Design Museum in London, from April 7 to July 30, as part of

(literally, to make sense), the first exhibition by the Chinese dissident artist devoted to design and art. 'architecture.

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The Chinese artist was inspired by Claude Monet's series of

, and in particular the huge painting exhibited at MoMA in New York.

For his revisited version, Ai Weiwei employed Lego bricks to

,” says a press release.

Broken sculptures

The artist used thousands of Lego pieces, donated by the public when the Danish company stopped selling them to him.

In 2015, the Chinese dissident was refused an order for bricks by the firm, which did not want them to be used for "

".

Ai Weiwei had used them to create giant portraits of political dissidents around the world.

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Among the works on display are hundreds of thousands of objects collected since the 1990s by Ai Weiwei.

One will be made up of thousands of pieces of porcelain sculptures that were smashed in his Beijing studio in 2018 by Chinese authorities.

The exhibition also features a coat hanger, the only object the artist was allowed to take to prison to hang his shirt.

For Justin McGuirk, the curator of the exhibition,

“

,” adds Ai Weiwei.