Ai Weiwei launches new London show

China feels it has the "right to redefine the global world order," Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei told AFP on April 5ahead of the opening in London of his first design-focused exhibition.

The show at the capital's Design Museum features hundreds of thousands of objects collected by the Chinese artist since the 1990s, from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks, and draws on his love of artefacts and traditional craftsmanship.

The son of a poet revered by former communist leaders, 65-year-old Ai is perhaps China's best-known modern artist and helped design the famous "Bird's Nest" stadium for Beijing's 2008 Olympics.

But he fell out of favor after criticizing the Chinese government and was imprisoned for 81 days in 2011 and eventually left for Germany four years later.

Among the artfacts in the new exhibition are thousands of fragments from Ai's porcelain sculptures which were destroyed when the bulldozers moved in to dismantle his studio in Beijing in 2018.

Launching the show which opens today, Ai, said he believed China was "not moving into a more civilized society, but [had] rather become quite brutal on anybody who has different ideas."

"Tension between China and the West is very natural," added the artist, who has lived in Europe since 2015.

"China feel they have their own power and right to redefine the global world order.

"They think China can become an important factor in changing the game rules, basically designed by the West world," he said.

Objects on display include 1,600 Stone Age tools, 10,000 Song Dynasty cannon balls retrieved from a moat and donated Lego bricks which the artist began working with in 2014 to produce portraits of political prisoners.

Exhibition curator Justin McGuirk...