London’s Design Museum will host an extensive exhibition with Ai Weiwei, marking the first time the artist’s work has been explored through the lens of design and architecture.
Opening in April, the exhibition – “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” – will include brand new works, exhibitions of objects collected by the artist and large-scale installations on the museum grounds. The biggest UK show directed by Ai Wei Wei in eight years, many plays will never have been shown before in the country, while others will be developed especially for the show.
Details of the exhibition were revealed today during a virtual press conference, during which curator Justin McGuirk spoke about the various works that will be on display. Later, the museum’s director and CEO, Tim Marlow, was joined by Ai Wei Wei for a conversation about the general concepts and themes that will be explored.
“Ai Weiwei is one of the most compelling artists and activists working today, but his practice is deeply pluralistic, encompassing film, architecture, design and collecting – so this exhibition is long overdue” , says Marlow, who previously worked alongside Ai. Weiwei for a performance at the Royal Academy in London in 2015.
Ai Wei Wei added: “This is an exhibition focusing on a very specific concept: design. I had to think about how we use the space of the Design Museum as a whole, and the exhibition provides a rich experience of what design is, and how design relates to our past and our situation. current.
The heart of the exhibition will be formed by a series of in situ installations. Everyone will see vast collections of objects – from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks – laid out on the gallery floor in a series of five so-called “fields”. Still, Life will showcase 1,600 tools dating back to the Late Stone Age, while Left Right Studio Material collects fragments of the porcelain sculptures destroyed when Ai Wei Wei’s workshop was destroyed by the Chinese state in 2018. Spouts explores 200,000 porcelain spouts from the Song Dynasty. teapots and wine ewers, and Untitled (Lego Incident) refers to the period when Lego briefly stopped selling to the artist when he began using the blocks to create portraits of political prisoners. In response, the public donated an overwhelming amount of Lego to his studio, and at the exhibition, the artworks made with them will be shown for the very first time.
Ai Wei Wei: Making Sense runs from April 7 to July 30 – check the Design Museum website for more information. For more design, check out this new furniture collection from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Steelcase.
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