Ai Weiwei: Making Sense

The Design Museum

The master provocateur creates timeless beauty from historical objects'
★★★★ The Independent 

'No one does it quite like Ai Weiwei' 
★★★★ The Times 

'Powerful, political and provocative art installations by Ai Weiwei at the Design Museum, challenging us to question the world we live in'
★★★★★ Culture Whisper

'Profoundly moving'
The Telegraph

Ai Weiwei is one of the most renowned and significant artists of our day whose practice moves indiscriminately across art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. 

This exhibition at London’s Design Museum, curated in collaboration with Weiwei, is the first dedicated to the artist's work as a commentary on contemporary design.

Featuring some of the artist's most important works, as well as a series of major site-specific installations, the exhibition is a meditation on material culture and the values this reveal.

In order to achieve the impactful lighting design for Ai Weiwei: Making Sense at the Design Museum, we drew upon theatrical lighting design techniques and fixtures. The works of Ai are unusual in the sense that they present themselves in vast fields of objects, intended to be viewed as a collective by the visitor. For this, we developed an approach which allowed us to create large, homogeneous and even fields of light to bring Ai Weiwei's objects to life. The colour temperature and hue of the fixtures themselves have been fine tuned for each individual field, enhancing the spectral response of the objects. The nature of the theatrical lighting fixtures allowed us to create boundaries of light and dark, inviting the audience through the gallery space via the interplay of positive and negative space.

The lighting design for colour house located within the Atrium of the Design Museum is unique in the sense that the scheme has been designed to reflect and recreate the natural colour shift of a daylight cycle. This was achieved with carefully timed programming, fixture placement and choice of colour. Over the duration of 5 minutes, the viewer is able to experience the colours of the house shifting naturally with certain tones becoming enhanced throughout the transition. We believe displaying this piece under naturalistic and realistic lighting conditions, the viewer is able to appreciate the nuances of it’s colour and craftsmanship.