One of the world’s most well-known living artists and activists, Ai Weiwei works across disciplines, from film and sculpture, to collection, curation, and archaeological excavation. Making Sense, however, is his first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and how traditional crafts and artefacts can help us re/consider what we value today. 

Like The Liberty of Doubt, it begins with Weiwei’s wallpaper, which wraps up the (free) space. From here, the Design Museum encourages us to ‘follow our own instincts’ through their diverse and multidisciplinary show. It’s muddled, even hard to follow; but unlike the Museum’s previous exhibitions, it’s difficult by design. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how else to curate works which challenge our expectations to this extent, and which might overlap in theme, but not medium.

It works best where these contrasts are sharply made, the curation reflecting the artist’s practice. One of Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects features over 200,000 hand-crafted porcelain spouts from Song dynasty China, their sheer quantity a testament to the scale of mass-production in Asia, many centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Nearby, we see a few spouts separated out, with their teapots and wine ewers, a sharp contrast between the individual, and the monumental. 

The artist often employs porcelain to speak of the state of China – both throughout history, and today. For curator Rachel Hajek, Weiwei’s works in design and architecture often speak to his ambiguous relationship with the government. Indeed, he has never seen China – nor any state – as his ‘homeland’ and this transience lends the artist, and his work, its universal appeal. 

Weiwei’s practice and politics live in these tensions between construction and destruction, past and present. His works are the embodiment of bothness; in ‘Through’ (2007-2008), for example, he merges Qing-era Chinese temples and tables, architecture and furniture together in a vast installation. This sculpture, coined ‘ruins in reverse’, is one of Making Sense’s most monumental works.

But more attention has been focused on the work which sits behind – his reimagining of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies with LEGO. (The Director claims we are to look through ‘Through’, in order to see it.) Weiwei uses the medium here to articulate his relationships with his father Ai Qing, a poet subjugated during the Cultural Revolution, as much as the Chinese state today. This use of a ‘children’s toy’ to speak to his father’s and family history is as novel as it is visually compelling. And better still, the Design Museum displays the work not as a reimagining of a Western masterpiece, but rather as the artist’s particular story, centring the artist rather than the dominant canons of art history.

Weiwei’s interests in LEGO also quietly speak to his own playfulness, and work in collaboration. It’s hinted at too in his ‘Backpack Snake’ (2008) and ‘Life Vest Snake’ (2009), sculptures dedicated to the victims of the refugee crisis in Europe and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China, and constructed from donated and assembled objects.

For the artist, the snake is a motif, a symbol of complex and unpredictable crises. Beyond his iconic ‘Bird’s Nest’ architecture for the Beijing Olympics, animals and the natural environment also seem to inform his practice – perhaps an area to be explored in future exhibitions. 

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For more on Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with Design Museum curator Rachel Hajek.

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense is showing at the Design Museum in London until 30 July 2023.

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