Ai Weiwei unveils recreation of Monet's 'Water Lilies' from LEGO

LEGO may not be the most conventional artistic medium, but Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has regularly returned to plastic bricks for some of his greatest works. In 2014, for example, he caused a sensation with Trace, a series of 176 Lego portraits of political prisoners.

Now, Ai's latest Lego artwork may be his most ambitious yet.

In an exhibition at London's Design Museum, Ai will show Water Lillies #1, his interpretation of the famous triptych that Claude Monet completed between 1914 and 1926. The nearly 50-foot-long work is the centerpiece of “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense,” the artist's first solo show in eight years. It consists of 650,000 Lego pieces and covers an entire wall of the gallery.

“In Water Lilies #1 I integrate Monet's impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and concrete experiences of my father and me in a digitized and pixelated language,” Ai said in a statement.

Ai, who grew up in exile, is the son of one of China's most famous poets, Ai Qing. His family lived in remote regions of China for much of his childhood. In Water Lillies #1, the artist alludes to this time by including among the flowers the outline of the door to an underground shelter where his family lived.

The dark spot "brutally pierces the watery paradise," combining Ai's experience with an otherwise idyllic scene, Justin McGuirk, the museum's chief curator, told The Guardian's Caroline Davies.

Through Legos, Ai also explores broader themes such as technology. Instead of oil paint strokes, his water lilies are created with the "depersonalized language of industrial parts and colors," McGuirk tells The Guardian. Meanwhile, the “pixel-like blocks suggest contemporary digital technologies central to modern life.”

Monet's Water Lilies are known for depicting the natural beauty of the artist's lily ponds in Giverny, France. Yet the Design Museum points out that even Monet's original is synthetic on some level, as its pond and gardens are man-made.

“There are so many layers of meaning in this work,” Rachel Hajek, curator at the Design Museum, tells ARTnews' Karen K. Ho.

Ai has never stuck to traditional materials in his art. In addition to Lego, he has worked with objects such as fences, rubber inflatable boats and bicycles, to name a few.

Ai Weiwei in Beijing in 2008 Andy Miah via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Ai is “China's most controversial, internationally known and eclectic artist,” wrote Smithsonian magazine's Christina Larson in 2014, “and his multimedia compositions are perhaps best known for their anti-authoritarian slant.”

Trace, the Lego portraits of political prisoners, was rooted in personal experiences. In 2011, authorities held Ai for 81 days on tax fraud charges. During that time, he was "questioned dozens of times" but "rarely asked about tax issues," BBC News' Damian Grammaticas reported.

The exhibition in London shows works of art from throughout Ai's career. It will be the first to show his work “as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values,” according to the Design Museum website, exploring the tensions between “past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless , construction and destruction.”