Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, has unveiled his latest project, "Water Lilies #1," a 15-metre-long recreation of Claude Monet's famous painting made entirely from Lego. The artwork,

made up of almost 650,000 Lego pieces, is a tribute to his late father and one of the centrepieces of his new exhibition, "Making Sense," at London's Design Museum.

Ai, who is known for his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and was previously detained and placed under house arrest, created a dark spot on the artwork to represent the door to the underground dwellings in China's Xinjiang province where his family lived in forced exile after his father, the poet Ai Qing, was labelled an enemy of the state. Monet was a favourite artist of Ai's father, and the piece is intended as a memory of him.

This is not the first time Ai has used Lego in his art. His 2014 installation, "Trace," comprised 176 Lego portraits of political prisoners from around the world. "Making Sense" also includes another new Lego artwork, "Untitled (Lego Incident)," made up of hundreds of thousands of toy bricks donated by members of the public after Lego briefly refused to sell their products to Ai in 2014.

The exhibition, Ai's largest UK show in eight years, features 42 new works, many of which have never been seen before in London. It includes 200,000 porcelain spouts from Song dynasty tea pots, thousands of fragments of Ai's porcelain sculptures which were destroyed when his Beijing studio was demolished in 2018, and around 1,600 tools dating from the late Stone Age.

According to Ai, many of the works on display are on public view for the first time because of the scale of their numbers or quantity. "Making Sense" runs at the Design Museum from April 7 to July 30, 2023. Photo by Hafenbar, Wikimedia commons.