Since creating portraits of political prisoners for a 2014 exhibition at the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco, iconic Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei has used LEGO or Woma bricks to make pixelated reproductions of politically charged images. Now on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery in Chelsea, a selection of toy-brick built artworks picture famous paintings and news photographs with telling alterations. Ai’s version of Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’ substitutes farmhouses in the work’s background with the artist’s newly built studio in Portugal, a replica of one destroyed by the Chinese authorities. Elsewhere, he adds President Biden to a reproduction of a news photo of the US Navy collecting debris from the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down near South Carolina in 2023. Here, he adds a dark area in the left of a version of Monet’s Water Lilies, representing the dugout where his exiled family was forced to live during the Cultural Revolution. (On view through Feb 22nd).
