Broken porcelain and Lego bricks for an Ai Weiwei exhibition in London in April

This exhibition, called "Making sense", will be the largest of this artist in the British capital for eight years. It will take place from April 7 to July 30.

The exhibition will show hundreds of thousands of objects collected since the 1990s by Ai Weiwei. These objects ranging from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks will be displayed on the floor of the gallery.

Large works will also be installed outside the exhibition gallery, in the free spaces of the museum as well as outside the building.

One of the works will be made up of thousands of pieces of porcelain sculptures that were broken in his Beijing studio in 2018 by Chinese authorities.

In another, Ai Weiwei will present thousands of Lego pieces, given to him by the public at a time when this company had stopped selling them to him because he used them to make portraits of political opponents.

“The exhibition provides a rich experience of what design is, and how design relates to our past and our current situation,” says Ai Weiwei.

For Justin McGuirk, the curator of the exhibition, "the demolition or the destruction or the loss of cultural memory is one of the main themes of this exhibition".

Among the objects on display will also be a coat hanger, the only object the artist was allowed to take to prison to hang his shirt.

Ai Weiwei, who has lived in Europe since 2015, is the son of a poet revered by former communist leaders.

He participated as an architect in the design of the "Bird's Nest" stadium for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

But he fell out of favor after criticizing the Chinese government and was jailed for 81 days in 2011 before finally moving to Germany four years later.