Ai Weiwei: “Know Thyself” and the Power of Lego, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 14 September 2023 – 30 March 2024
Ai Weiwei, Know Thyself, 2022© Ai Weiwei. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
The “paintings” below probably look very familiar to you. But take a closer look: the images are actually composed of tiny Lego bricks. The structure of the Lego bricks brings a very special, grainy quality to the images. It is hard to resist the temptation to touch them. And there’s an unusual twist to every single one of them. They are the work of Ai Weiwei, one of the most important contemporary artists working today. From 14 September 2023 until 30 March 2024, nine works by Ai Weiwei created with Lego bricks are on show at his solo exhibition “Know Thyself”at the Berlin Gallery neugerriemschneider. In this exhibition, he re-imagines famous artistic works of the past by connecting them to personal experiences and our own lives. Read on if you are ready for some surprises!
Water Lilies #2
Ai Weiwei, Water Lilies #2, 2022© Ai Weiwei. Lego bricks, 268 x 1530 cm. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza
Who doesn’t love Claude Monet’s Water Lilies? Ai Weiwei adds his own, dark twist. The strange black rectangle on the right represents the entrance door to the hole in the ground he and his exiled father lived in when he was a boy. Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing, China, in 1957. As a boy, he spent several years living in a hole in the ground on the edge of the desert in North-East China. This was his first experience of political repression: the Chinese Communist Party had sent his father Ai Qing, a well-known poet, into exile. Even though Ai Quing was already in his sixties, he was forced to clean the communal public toilets of the village for five years.
Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist whose imaginative works and installations invite the viewer to think about political and social issues that are important to him. His work is openly critical of the Chinese government and its human rights violations. His investigations of government corruption and his open criticism of the Chinese government led to his arrest in Beijing in 2011. He was held in a tiny cell without a window in a police detention centre for over eighty days without concrete charges. Two soldiers were positioned inside his cell around the clock, watching him all the time. He was forbidden to speak to the press after his release, but a source close to Ai Weiwei told the BBC that the artist had felt “close to death” every minute of his detention. The artist left China in 2015 and is currently based in Portugal and the United Kingdom.
The Last Supper in Pink
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1494-1498, Paris Orlando, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Notice the difference between Leonardo da Vinci’s original mural above, and Ai Weiwei’s pop art-style, pink Lego version below? The difference in colour is obvious but take a close look at the fourth person from the left. Ai Weiwei has inserted himself into the “painting,” taking the position of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus’s whereabouts to the Romans for thirty pieces of silver. Ai Weiwei is laughing, alluding to his own troubled relationship with the authorities.
Ai Weiwei, The Last Supper in Pink, 2022© Ai Weiwei. Lego bricks, 344.8 x 689.7 cm. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
Ai Weiwei started working with Lego in 2014, when he was still living in China. At the time, the authorities had put him under house arrest, but he continued to work on an exhibition about human rights activists to be held on Alcatraz, the famous prison island offshore from San Francisco. Looking at the photos of human right activists, he was wondering how to create his works. He suddenly noticed that his son was playing with Lego and decided to base his exhibition on Lego bricks: he could work out a concept while under house arrest in China and then email the precise plans to his assistants working in the US, instructing them how to assemble the Lego portraits in the US. Since then, he has repeatedly used Lego in his work.
Mona Lisa Smeared in Cream in White
Ai Weiwei, Mona Lisa Smeared in Cream in White, 2023© Ai Weiwei. Lego bricks, 114,9 x 76,6 cm. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
Everybody knows the Mona Lisa. This work again looks like a pop art version of the original, but do you notice the strange smudge? Ai Weiwei is alluding to the smudge left on the Mona Lisa’s glass cover after a climate activist threw paint at it. In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel, Ai Weiwei stressed that he is against this type of climate activism.
Do you feel inspired to create your own Lego images with a twist? If you email us a photo (editors@teenworldarts.com), we might publish it!
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