Ai Weiwei , one of the world’s most celebrated and recognized artists, is set to open a major exhibition at the
Design Museum in London in April. Titled “
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense ,” the exhibition will be the artist’s first
to focus on design and architecture. and will feature works never before exhibited in the UK, as well as new pieces. Large-scale works will also be installed outside the gallery, in the museum’s free-to-enter spaces, as well as outside the museum.
Known for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei works across many disciplines: art, architecture, design, film, collecting, and curation. In this exhibition, Ai uses design as a lens through which to observe what we value. About the exhibition, Ai Weiwei said: “
This is an exhibition focused on a very specific concept: design . I had to think about how we use the Design Museum space as a whole, and the exhibition offers a rich experience of what design is and how it works. how design relates to our past and our current situation.”
Hundreds of thousands of objects will be placed on the gallery floor in five 'Fields'.
These objects – from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks – have been collected by Ai Weiwei since the 1990s , and are a result of his ongoing fascination with artifacts and craft traditions. Along the way, visitors are invited to find meaning in the pieces, walking among them and absorbing thousands of years of human ingenuity.
Highlights also include a number of examples of
“ordinary” objects that have been transformed into something useless but valuable. These include a worker’s helmet cast in glass and a sculpture of an iPhone that was cut from an axe head. of jade. There are also works that
reference the Covid-19 pandemic that exposed our dependence on simple things. Thus,
three toilet paper sculptures will be on display: two life-size rolls (one in marble and one in glass) and a sculpture in two-meter-long marble that is being exhibited for the first time. These works will all be displayed in the context of China's rapidly changing urban landscape, which Ai has documented through photographic and cinematic works that will also be in the exhibition.
