Detail: Nearly 50 feet in length and made from 650,000 LEGO blocks, Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies (2022) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious LEGO work to date. This reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic triptych from the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers an equally immersive experience, merging the lush beauty of Monet’s water lilies with Ai’s personal history.

Visitors can experience this work—displayed in one long panel on a single wall—up close in an intimate gallery at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This is the first time this work has been shown in the US; it debuted in 2023 at the Berlin art gallery neugerriemschneider.

The piece has a connection with the Seattle Art Museum’s history. An actual Monet Water Lilies work was loaned to the museum in 1956 by Walter P. Chrysler Jr., who purchased it from the Monet estate and toured it around the United States. The painting was displayed in the Fuller Garden Court of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the original home of the Seattle Art Museum