On April 7, the exhibition Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, dedicated to the work of the great Chinese artist, will open to the public at the Design Museum in London. Among the works on display, the most monumental and curious will be Water Lilies #1, a fifteen-meter-long curved panel reproducing one of the paintings dedicated to water lilies by Impressionist artist Claude Monet. The work is curious because the artist chose to represent Monet’s entire color palette using 650000 LEGO bricks of 22 different colors.

The LEGO bricks thus create a pixelated effect that is meant to make us reflect on the more industrial ways in which artworks are disseminated and how we have become more accustomed to recognizing great masterpieces of art.
The only modification Ai Weiwei makes to Monet’s work is on the right side, where he inserts the detail of a dark portal representing the underground trapdoor in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father lived in forced exile in the 1960s.
Ai Weiwei in London will also exhibit another work featuring the world’s most famous toy bricks, which will be given away to visitors in protest of the company that refused to sell the bricks to the Chinese artist in 2014.