London's Design Museum to Stage Major Exhibition with Ai Weiwei

The Design Museum in London is set to host a vast exhibition with Ai Weiwei, marking the first time that the artist’s work has been explored through the lens of design and architecture.

Opening in April, the show – “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” – will include brand-new works, displays of objects collected by the artist, and large-scale installations across the museum’s site. The biggest UK show to be staged by Ai Wei Wei in eight years, many pieces will have never before been shown in the country, while others will be developed especially for the show.

Details of the show were revealed today at a virtual press conference, at which curator Justin McGuirk spoke through the various works set to be on show. Later, the museum’s Director and CEO Tim Marlow was joined by Ai Wei Wei for a conversation about the overarching concepts and themes that will be explored.

“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,” says Marlow, who previously worked alongside Ai Weiwei for a show at London’s Royal Academy 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 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.”

The heart of the exhibition will be formed by a series of site-specific installations. Each will see vast collections of objects – from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks – laid out across the floor of the gallery in a series of five so-called “fields”. Still, Life will feature 1,600 tools dating from the late Stone Age, while Left Right Studio Material brings together fragments of the porcelain sculptures destroyed when Ai Wei Wei’s studio was destroyed by the Chinese state in 2018. Spouts explore 200,000 porcelain spouts from Song-dynasty teapots and wine ewers, and Untitled (Lego Incident) refers to the period of time 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 resulting artworks made with them will be presented for the very first time.

Ai Wei Wei: Making Sense runs from April 7 to July 30 – check out the Design Museum website for more information. For more design, check out this new furniture collection from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Steelcase.

Design Museum
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