A wave of 380,000 LEGO flowers on Shanghai’s West Bund

For the LEGO Bloom Exhibition, more than 380,000 hand-built LEGO botanical blooms flowed out of Tank Shanghai Art Center and onto Shanghai’s West Bund. The LEGO Botanical Wave, about 30 metres long and covering 800 square metres, ran from 1 to 29 October 2026 as the centrepiece of a free exhibition in and around the former fuel tanks.

LEGO presents the work as a way to bring “a little more colour, a little surprise, and a little more life into the city” as autumn arrives. The flowers are arranged as streams that gather into waves, spilling from the building across the paved ground in reds, oranges, pinks and yellows.

Where Blooms Begin

Inside, Where Blooms Begin invited visitors to build a LEGO botanical flower of their own. Each creation was scanned and turned into a digital bloom, joining a constantly changing flower landscape made with other visitors’ flowers. As more flowers entered, they began to move together as a collective digital flow, echoing the physical wave outside.

The distinction is deliberate. The 380,000 blooms of the outdoor installation were built for the exhibition, while the indoor experience let every visitor add a flower of their own.

Bloom Gallery

The LEGO Bloom Exhibition also included Bloom Gallery, with 18 LEGO Botanical arrangements and 18 artworks made by artists and AFOLs, adult fans of LEGO.

Tank Shanghai occupies five large fuel reserve tanks from the former Longhua Airport in the West Bund area of Xuhui District. The Beijing-based firm OPEN Architecture converted them into an art centre, which opened in March 2019.

Designer: LEGO / @lego
Photography: Courtesy of LEGO
Location: Tank Shanghai Art Center, 2380 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai, China