Ai Weiwei to take over the Design Museum with major exhibition and installations

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense will be the artist’s very first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and will mix recent works with commissioned pieces, inviting us into a meditation on value and humanity, art and activism.

Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most celebrated and recognisable living artists, is to open a major new exhibition at the Design Museum in April 2023.

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense will be the artist’s very first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and will be his biggest UK show in eight years. The exhibition will feature works never shown before in the UK, as well as new pieces displayed for the very first time. There will be large- scale works installed outside of the exhibition gallery, in the museum’s free-to-enter spaces as well as outside the building.

Image: © Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

Known around the world for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei works across many disciplines: his practice emcompasses art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. In this exhibition, 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. These collection-based works have never been brought together before. Three of the fields have been created for this exhibition and will be seen for the very first time. The other two have never been seen in the UK before.

Image: Untitled (LEGO Incident). © Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

Alongside the fields will be dozens of 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, which will be on show, epitomises these clashes. Location: 224-238 Kensington High Street, Kensington, London W8 6AG, Date: 7 April - 30 July 2023. Price: from £16.50/Concessions available.