Ai WeiWei and Lego
https://youtu.be/xKPCAC4nXII
A single, standard LEGO brick—a recognizable shape on any parent or child’s floor—takes up less than an inch of space. It might be just one brick, but it stands for something much larger: the promise of creative expression. As soon as that one brick is added to another, something is built.
The concept of one voice standing for something larger also applies to the effectiveness of LEGO bricks as the medium for this installation. A single LEGO brick symbolizes, in part, Ai’s emphasis on the power of the individual, building upon each other to create a movement. In a video interview with NPR in June, the artist explained, “I want the image to be seen, and to create that image, we need a language. So LEGO, I think, is the easiest language.”
Ai and his team worked with Amnesty International to identify and research the 176 political dissidents from more than 30 countries featured in the exhibition, most of whom are still incarcerated. When researching the faces of each prisoner, some of the pictures online were highly pixilated as if taken by surveillance cameras, which lent themselves perfectly to LEGO’s intrinsic block design.
In the corner of each of the six areas throughout the gallery, an interactive kiosk allows visitors to delve deeper into the complex stories of each subject: people like journalist Reeyot Alemu from Ethiopia, or singer-songwriter Tran Vu Anh Binh from Vietnam, or the controversial American fugitive Edward Snowden. (All of the names, pictures and stories are available on the FOR-SITE Foundation website.)
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