Au Havre, Ai Weiwei réinvente les « Nymphéas » de Monet en 1,3 million de briques de Lego
At the MuMa museum in Le Havre, France, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei presents two monumental Lego brick works, "Water Lilies #1" and "Water Lilies #2" (2022), each composed of approximately 650,000 bricks and stretching fifteen meters long. The pieces are shown for the first time in France as part of the Normandie Impressionniste festival and the centenary of Claude Monet's death, directly engaging with Monet's 1904 "Nymphéas" painting in the exhibition "Monet au Havre." The works serve as a personal homage to Ai Weiwei's father, the poet Ai Qing, who discovered Impressionism while studying in France and later, during Maoist persecution, found refuge in the memory of Monet's light.
The exhibition matters because it reinterprets a canonical masterpiece through a contemporary, playful, and politically charged medium. Ai Weiwei's use of Lego bricks—previously employed to circumvent Chinese censorship by creating dismantlable portraits of political prisoners—transforms Monet's iconic water lilies into a commentary on the commodification of art, mass reproduction, and personal memory. The juxtaposition of the immersive, contemplative Lego mosaics with the original painting highlights enduring themes of escapism and resilience, linking Monet's response to World War I with Ai Weiwei's own history of exile and persecution.