The precious flowers, drifting, their movement almost imperceptible, over the liquid blue-green surfaces of the artist’s ...

This marked the beginning of his most famous series of paintings—Water Lilies. Claude Monet started working on a project that would later become known as his Water Lilies series in 1899.

In Water Lilies #1, Ai probes notions of reality and artifice. Although Monet’s word-famous painting represents the epitome of natural beauty, the pond and gardens he depicts were in fact a man-made ...