Ai Weiwei: Making Sense

Ai Weiwei's Making Sense exhibition showed at London's Design Museum in 2023. Developed in collaboration with the artist, the programme was described as ‘the first to present his work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values' and combined recent works with commissioned pieces. The exhibition was the first to bring Ai's vast collections together, from Neolithic stone tools to modern, mass-produced objects.

The book opens with a foreword by Design

Museum CEO and director Tim Marlow and an introduction to the exhibition by chief curator Justin McGuirk, who describes the show as ‘a meditation on cultural values, and how what we value shifts over time' where design ‘offers the overarching framework'. Afterward, visuals of the show take pride of place, split into chapters titled Evidence, Construction/Destruction and Ordinary Things. Text is minimal, with brief introductory text and captions that allow the images to do much of the speaking for themselves. The final part of the book is the most substantive, with essays by Wang Shu, Julia Lovell and others, plus a transcript of a discussion between Ai and architect Eyal Weizman. Essays cover craft, collecting and the urbanisation and industrialisation of China, rounding off a fascinating treatment of one of the world's foremost artists.