This week, London’s Design Museum announced details of a major new solo exhibition by Ai Weiwei – one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists. Ai Weiwei: Making Sense will be the artist’s first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and it will be his biggest UK show in eight years. Featuring work not previously seen in the UK along with major new pieces displayed for the first time, visitors will also see large-scale work installed outside.
Internationally renowned for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei works across many disciplines. His practice encompasses art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. In Making Sense, Ai uses design and the history of making as a lens through which to consider what we value.
At the heart of the exhibition will be a series of major site-specific installations. Hundreds of thousands of objects will be laid out on the floor of the gallery in a series of five expansive ‘fields’. These objects — from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks — have been collected together by Ai Weiwei since the 1990s, and are the result of his ongoing fascination with artefacts and traditional craftsmanship.
Also in the exhibition are objects and artworks from throughout Ai Weiwei’s career that explore the tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction. His Han dynasty urn emblazoned with a Coca-Cola logo epitomises these clashes.
Plus works that reference the Covid-19 pandemic and, amongst the large-scale works to be installed outside the exhibition space, Coloured House – the timber frame of a house that once belonged to a prosperous family in Zhejiang province, in eastern China, during the early Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911 CE) now painted by Ai Weiwei with industrial colours and installed on crystal bases, combining ancient and modern. This will be the first time Coloured House has been seen in the UK.
Tim Marlow, Director and CEO of the Design Museum, said: “Ai Weiwei is one of the most compelling artists and activists working today, but his practice is profoundly pluralistic, encompassing film, architecture, design and collecting. This exhibition is, therefore, long overdue and I’m proud that the Design Museum is the first institution to frame the work of Ai Weiwei through the lens of architecture and design and to collaborate in new ways with one of the great creative forces of the 21st century to date.”
Ai Weiwei said: “This is an exhibition focused on a very specific concept: design. I had to think about how we use the space in the Design Museum as a whole, and the exhibition offers a rich experience of what design is, and how design relates to our past and to our current situation.”
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum from 07 April to 30 July 2023. For further information and to book tickets: designmuseum.org
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Image: Ai Weiwei, Still Life, 1993-2000 © Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio