ROOT MASTER

Ai Weiwei digs deep into design history, gathering everything from Neolithic tools to Lego bricks for his new show at London's Design Museum. We visit him at home in Portugal for a preview

- TF CHAN

Ai Weiwei is not known to do things in half measures. For his installation at Documenta 12, in 2007, the artist famously brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, for staggered week-long stays, using his blog to recruit volunteers between the ages of two and 70. Titled Fairytale, the ambitious artwork seemed to herald his homeland’s arrival on the world stage (‘To explore the world is a right that you acquire when you are born, and these travellers were exercising this right for the very first time,’ he wrote in his recent autobiography), while speaking to contemporary global issues, such as mass migration and dramatic population growth. Three years later, invited to take over the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, Ai commissioned 1,600 ceramicists in the pottery town of Jingdezhen to handcraft 100 million sunflower seeds in porcelain, which he then poured into the cavernous exhibition space to create a seemingly infinite landscape – a simple motif elevated into a powerful statement on the rise of ‘made in China’.

Though slightly more modest in scale, the centrepiece of Ai’s upcoming exhibition at London’s Design Museum, which opens this April, will similarly evoke the cumulative power of the humble object. Taking over the main gallery are five ‘fields’, each between 44 and 72 sq m and filled with readymades ranging from Neolithic stone tools to Lego bricks, which collectively offer a snapshot of design history across eight millennia.