The Brooklyn Rail

I met Ai Weiwei in the summer of 2008 in Beijing. He didn’t really talk to me—he talked to the two younger Chinese curators with me (in Chinese, which I unfortunately don’t speak). Afterwards, one of them told me that he’d said critical and courageous things about the Chinese political system that she’d always thought but was afraid to say or think. At the end of the conversation I asked why he didn’t just leave if he felt it was so bad in China, and he snapped “where am I supposed to go, the moon?” In retrospect, perhaps he was making a point about the fact that everywhere else was embracing China’s brand of Capitalist-based-fascism, of which we have become well aware. The works in this pair of exhibitions, almost all Lego (or Woma, Chinese Lego), are manipulations of classic paintings and photographs, at times overtly call out the United States morphing towards oligarco-fascism, such as Last U.S. Soldier Leaving Afghanistan (2022) or Truth (2023) a portrait of antihero Julian Assange. But it also appears more colorfully in Washington Crossing the Delaware (2023), a recreation of Leutze’s 1851 historic painting, where Ai has placed the Bird’s Nest stadium he designed with Herzog & de Meuron—and consequently disavowed—in the far left corner. I initially read this as a cautionary allegory of the United States approaching a Chinese form of government. It then became apparent that Ai placed bits of himself in almost all the pictures, like the structure of his new home/studio in Portugal in the corner of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (2023) or his Coca-Cola painted vase in Balthus’s Thérese Dreaming (2024), so it might also just be a form of self-portraiture. In our conversation I asked him where he got off re-painting Neolithic vases, and he claimed he was making them better. When I asked if he was ok with someone in the future painting over his work he quipped that it would be fine, as long as they made them better—but they were already the best.

Lego has a distinguished lineage as a medium for political discourse: Zbigniew Libera’s fantastic LEGO Concentration Camp (1996) immediately evokes the disturbing combination of a trigger of almost universally happy childhood memories and the disturbing structures one can make with them. Ai has utilized the blocks as a means of recreating paintings and photographs, but the unforgettable texture of little circular nubbins on a square or rectangular background is clearly visible and the association is immediate. Might the Lego circle-in-a-square format have a resonance with the classic Chinese theological formulation of heaven-and-earth? I’m not sure. By rendering Claude Monet, Peter Paul Rubens, Frank Stella, Giorgione/Titian, Marcel Duchamp, Warhol/da Vinci in a childhood toy, Ai eviscerates any sense of elitism or class value, much as he did by destroying a priceless antique in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), or crudely giving the finger to great landmarks of the world in the series Study of Perspective (1995-2017). The Lego medium also allows him to render both press images like the eerie night-vision goggle picture Last U.S. Soldier Leaving Afghanistan or the weather photographs Nord Stream (2022) and Nord Stream #1 (2024) on the same level as Balthus and Johannes Vermeer, shedding the baggage that clings to traditional artist materials like oil paint. But as is always the case with Ai’s work, the political comes with the personal: in the two recreations of Monet’s nymphéas; Water Lillies #3 (2023), and Water Lillies #4 (2022), the toy brick pixels coalesce around an unfamiliar black void which is the doorway to a subterranean burrow that Ai’s family inhabited during his father’s exile in the country. Many of the paintings rely on an inside knowledge of Ai’s biography as well as a decent image retention from Art History 101, which may or may not backfire, but the juxtaposition between the classic European painting cannon and odd twists, such as the Coca-Cola logo in a Balthus painting are clear enough and set the tone of quietly apocalyptic references.

It isn’t all doom and gloom: the Lego/Woma medium offers some intriguing aesthetic painterly possibilities. The plastic blocks are arranged in a spectrum-style format á la Georges Seurat—a wide variety of unexpected colors emerge as one draws closer, and when one steps back, the paintings take on their illusionistic volume. One can get lost in the myriad colors as a face dissolves. This works well with the Monet-based water lilies, where the image flickers between recognizability as the painter’s masterpiece, and some kind of thermo-cartographic hellscape. In The Last Supper in Turquoise (2022) this method of re-assigning colors to a pre-existing work of art yields wonderful and mesmerizing patterns in the blocks. But this is a dark show: the floor of the central gallery at Faurschou is lined with ninety porcelain WWII German helmets, beautiful and skull-like. Their placement in the gallery allows them to infect the surrounding images drawn from Leutze, Stella, Monet, and Rubens with an extra-morbid interpretation. At the start of What You See is What You See, a black and white Woma panel The End (2024) offers the closing frame to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940): Ai’s piece suggests the same assessment for his work as for Chaplin’s very sweet and overall lighthearted movie; it would all be very funny if it hadn’t ended so badly.