Ai Weiwei Knocks Down the Building Blocks of Empire

All great empires rise gradually: brick by brick, wall by wall, fort by fort, war by war, plunder by plunder.

And when they fall, they don’t just disappear in a puff of smoke. They dissolve slowly and painfully: year by year, decade by decade, century by century, coup by coup, revolt by revolt.

“The End,” reads a large grayscale artwork at the entrance of Ai Weiwei’s exhibition What You See Is What You See at Faurschou New York. It reproduces the closing frame of The Great Dictator (1940), Charlie Chaplin’s film parody of Adolf Hitler. With other pieces depicting the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, the suspicious Nord Stream pipeline explosions of 2022, and a portrait of tyrannized WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, it becomes clear that we’re looking at a scathing indictment of empire.

I almost forgot to mention that all of the wall pieces in the show are made of toy bricks (LEGO and its Chinese equivalent WOMA). Tens of thousands of them laid piece by piece, line by line, pixel by pixel, hand by hand.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ai presents a lineup of familiar Western art historical masterpieces, each with a catch. Emanuel Leutze’s George Washington wades his boat through climate-induced glaciers across the Delaware, while China looms as the world’s next hegemon in the background. On the rightmost side of a colossal, 650,000-brick version of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies,” a mysterious dark void recalls the time spent by both the artist and his father in Chinese gulags and prisons.

A Warholian interpretation of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” (1515–20) features Ai as Judas (“I want to tell people not to trust me,” he told Jane Ursula Harris in an interview published on the gallery’s website). Giorgione’s 1510 “Sleeping Venus” slumbers next to a coat hanger used for at-home abortions, and Frank Stella’s 1967 “Harran II” is reimagined with the colors of the Palestinian flag.    

It’s been a decade since Ai showed his first toy-brick artwork in an exhibtion at the infamous Alcatraz Prison outside San Francisco. You can see why he keeps returning to this medium. There’s a whiff of the dialectical in the way toy bricks symbolize childhood, innocence, and play, while also embodying readymade culture, mass production, and unbridled consumerism. Ai also plays with our delusions of individualism and the shaky notion of authorship in the age of digital reproduction. He a middle finger at both empire and the commercial art world. Often, the two are hard to tell apart.