Por María Izquierdo 
The exhibition of the Chinese artist and activist, closed last Sunday, May 18, has attracted more than 96,000 people to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León.
May 21, 2025
Castilla y León |
Department of Culture, Tourism, and Sports
96,749 people have enjoyed the exhibition ‘Ai Weiwei. Don Quixote’ at MUSAC, which was presented by the Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Sports, Gonzalo Santonja, along with the artist, on November 8. The exhibition has allowed the viewing of 42 works in León —many of them monumental— by the renowned artist Ai Weiwei and has attracted 56% of local audience and 44% of national and international audience, exceeding all expectations and contributing to the tourism development of the city.
With over 1,700 m2, ‘Don Quixote’ has been one of the most ambitious exhibition projects to date by the Chinese artist and dissident, who declared last November that it is his best exhibition to date. Curated by the director of MUSAC, Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, the exhibition was designed exclusively with the artist for the Leonese museum, whose rooms have been able to house some of his most monumental works, impossible to exhibit in other museums. This is the case of the installation La Commedia Umana (2017-2021), which was exhibited for the first time in a museum.
It is also the first project that has extensively exhibited the series of paintings made by Ai Weiwei (Beijing, 1957) with toy bricks, which were the guiding thread of the project: nineteen works in which the artist uses the forty available colors of these plastic toy pieces to produce images that recreate paintings from art history, modify photographs from the media, or recreate works previously made by Ai Weiwei using other techniques.