Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Site-specific installation by Ai Weiwei

Factory International, Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 6 September 2026

Including a 24-hour durational performance, Sewing a Button, featuring Ai Weiwei in the Hall, Aviva Studios, Manchester, from 5pm 3 July – 5pm 4 July 2026

Ai Weiwei: Button up! is the largest ever site-specific exhibition of the artist’s work. Indeed, Aviva Studios in Manchester, which opened in 2023, is the largest purpose-built art space of its kind in the world – about the size of an aircraft hangar, its concrete and corrugated metal design harks back to Manchester’s industrial past. In a nod to the city’s role in Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution, the works on display are for the most part monumental, produced on an industrial scale, and reflect Ai Weiwei’s interest in historical forces of rupture and repair, continuity and reinvention. A clear concern for the artist is China’s rapid industrialisation – far outstripping Manchester or any other workshop of the world – as it goes for growth. The works stand as massive laments for a loss of the human in scale – for the touch of the human hand in processes of manufacture that produced China’s material culture and artworks over past centuries and, most urgently, considering the inherent danger in such a concentration of power, for the loss of a human face, a loss of empathy.

At 47 metres long, Law of the Journey (2017, 2025) is an inflatable black rubber boat holding 258 larger than life refugee figures that spans the entire length of the hangar. The silent figures are reminiscent of the unearthed Chinese Terracotta Army, but unlike that ancient, buried army of the dead with its individualised features, these boat-bound figures are faceless, black PVC presences passing anonymously into the black waters of an imagined journey. Also black, suspended from the ceiling, is La Commedia Umana (2017-2021), a dancing chandelier of skeletons, viscera, reptiles and bats made of glass hand-produced in Murano. An ominous dance of death, it casts no light but is lit up to cast its shadow on the floor – you can’t reach up and touch it, but its shadow touches you.

Button up, indeed – Ai Weiwei’s works take us on a journey through an extraordinarily dangerous world full of human tragedy, one marked by human failure and compounded by the failure to be human. An audio installation heard everywhere in the hall, Nian Nian / 念念 / (Commemoration) (2021), begins as an unknown, repetitive sounding of several syllables in Chinese, until you realise – a heartrending moment for me – its insistence is on naming all 5,197 schoolchildren who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a result of the corruption and shoddy construction of their schools. The recorded loop lasts for 39 days. It was the following year, 2009, during Ai Weiwei’s activism among people protesting at this tragedy, that he was detained and beaten by Chinese police, almost dying from a brain haemorrhage. The man has courage, has suffered, and has made compassion a central principle of his work.

Surfing (After Hokusai), Ai Weiwei’s large wall-hung picture (about three times the size of the original), recreates Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa out of LEGO bricks. The LEGO company initially refused his bulk order, objecting to ‘political use’. He responded by making the refusal an issue of free creativity versus censorship – clearly understanding how to challenge the commercial value of the brand. Well, he got his LEGO bricks, and swapped the storm-tossed fishing boats in the original for the small boats of migrants and refugees. The work is playful, and serious, as impressive as the original (which used perspective drawing and Prussian Blue pigment, both themselves reproduced from Europe and new to Japan). It brings into focus the artist’s thoughtful approach to reproducing art works (few are now as frequently reproduced as Hokusai’s image), the deployment of the large-scale and monumental in his work, as well as Ai Weiwei’s transnational humanitarian concerns. Reproducing lost, broken, looted or even well-known works becomes in his art practice a form of dialogue, of repair and remembrance, and a renewing of relevance – both paying homage and playing forward into new meanings. To top it all, 100% of the proceeds from the auction of Surfing (After Hokusai) were donated to an environmental charity, Blue Marine International. What more could one ask from China’s most internationally renowned artist in exile? One whose only fear is, as he claims, losing the ability to feel?

The intelligent humanism of Ai Weiwei completely overwhelmed my resistance to his pre-eminence in the power dynamics of the art world, the big shows and the big bucks put up to tell us what the art market thinks is valuable. Though I have no idea who he really is, he is stoically thinking and present throughout his works, creatively responding to pressures and wider human crises with extremely well-judged critiques of scale, of power and empire, of history and its heartbreaks. A towering circle of 12 bronze animal heads on pillars, Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads (2010), recreates a Qing imperial fountain in Beijing looted by the French and British in the Second Opium War in 1860. The heads face outward, representing a 12-year cycle of human qualities – mine, for example, the Ox, stands for humility.

Looking at China’s tumultuous history under Communist one-party rule, and under the much longer five-clawed Imperial dragon of Confucian authoritarianism, Ai Weiwei handles, repairs, restores, reproduces and recreates China’s material culture and artistic traditions as ongoing expressions of both cultural continuity and human presence. Influenced in his time as an art student in the United States by the conceptual art and readymades of Marcel Duchamp – think of the urinal presented as a fountain – and by the commercial pop art of Andy Warhol – think LEGO bricks instead of soup cans – Ai Weiwei claims to have taken ‘China as a readymade’ for his art, representing it in new ways, urging it to remain less mythological dragon and more human. His other ‘readymade’ is Western hegemony and the mistreatment of China during its ‘century of humiliation’, which he warns is a whirlwind we are yet to reap. And overseeing everything in this exhibition is the one human face we are given to see clearly, Ai Weiwei’s own.

Sewing a Button

In Sewing a Button (2026), a 24-hour durational performance in the Aviva Studios theatre, Ai Weiwei appears watchful, observant, stoic, not allowed to speak, but looking back at the surveillance cameras and the audience.

Co-created by Ai Weiwei and Low Kee Hong, Creative Director at Factory International, to coincide with the 15th anniversary of his incarceration in 2011, the live performance of Sewing a Button reproduces over the course of one day the 81 days in which Ai Weiwei was held in secret detention by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, flanked at all times by two military guards, even while sleeping, brushing his teeth and going to the toilet.

A cast of nine actors play military guards and doctors, entering and leaving a completely exposed, brightly lit box cell placed in the centre of a wide stage. Above the sparsely furnished cell, acting as a raised fourth wall, is a screen replaying CCTV surveillance footage. There is a bed, a chair wrapped in plastic, and a washroom with a toilet and basin completely open to the audience. To one side of the stage, lit up in the dark, is an operator with a bank of monitors. Weiwei paces the cell (his main activity), or sits as ordered to eat, or to be examined by doctors and be given unexplained medicines he is required to take in front of them.

Occasionally, while pacing his cell, flanked by the guards who walk with him but order him not to talk, Ai Weiwei glances out at the audience, breaking the fourth wall. It is a grim realisation that we, as spectators in the auditorium, are firmly part of the surveillance regime the artist experiences. Time moves slowly, with the guards periodically glancing at their wristwatches, waiting to be relieved, and then leaps ahead to announce, after some hours, on the overhead electronic clock that we are, for example, already on Day 05 and that the time is 02:43:49. It is a maddening experience to be caught up in this ritual of hours, days, months, pacing a cell, with a feeling settling on the audience of being strung out between tension and tedium. It is an ordeal, a test of endurance, which Ai Weiwei meets with a clear gaze, before he again shuts his eyes and bows his head, retreating to an inner privacy as a place of sanity. And it was difficult for the audience. People began trickling out of the theatre after the first hour, watched by Ai Weiwei without betraying a flicker of judgment (which certainly came in form of bristling indignation from other members of the audience, before they, too, quietly but steadily, abandoned what became an unbearably tense vigil of solidarity and fled for the exit).

Ai Weiwei’s impassive, thoughtful, compliant, resigned, watchful face, which I studied closely for some hours, is the central spectacle of the performance – the human face which is markedly absent from the wider installation of his works in the Aviva Studios, works that critique impersonal forces in human history, such as the power of the state to curtail or destroy personal freedom and human creativity. In a track suit and sliders, walking beside military fatigues and boots, the ordinariness of the man who does not know how long his detention will last and cannot consider escape is stripped to its essence. Ai Weiwei is a man, not a hero; he was there, he suffered.

As with the slowed down or speeded up passage of time on stage, this performance is not a one-to-one mapping of his experience in detention, but rather a way to grasp its essence and communicate openly what it means for him and may mean for us. Puncturing long periods of enforced silence and continual surveillance are the interrogations. In this performance, the military interrogators are replaced by writers, journalists and broadcasters, Nihal Arthanayake, Emma Dabiri, Lemn Sissay and Zing Tsjeng, who pose questions ranging from the personal to the political and philosophical. These ‘interrogations’ came in the hours after the expiry of my timed ticket, so I cannot comment on them. However, the voice of Ai Weiwei reflecting on his thought, his activism, his art and his experience would make listening back to these exchanges well worth it should they be made available at a later date. (Though the performance was live streamed across several countries, no link was advertised for later access.)

The title of the performance refers to a button which Weiwei asked for to close the fly of his prison trousers. Eventually, after weeks, he was given a button, a needle and thread to sew it on himself. This button is reflected elsewhere in Ai Weiwei: Button Up! – a simple object, mass produced, which carries meanings of personal dignity and simple needs, but can be used to explore wider issues of industrial scale production, power and incarceration. ‘Button up!’ is also, of course, an instruction to be silent.

It took some courage, I felt, to go back for even one day to his secret detention, and I wrestled with my own feelings about what it meant for Ai Weiwei to reproduce those conditions of unknowing for himself and for us. It showed me his defiance, an inner strength I admired, once I overcame a misgiving that this might be some form of Freudian compulsion-repetition of trauma. As perhaps a pointed and public rebuke to a state that could impose such harsh conditions, I began to think of this extra day in captivity as, in Christian terms, his ‘going the extra mile’. However, Ai Weiwei is above all a Chinese artist, experiencing China from his own personal, deeply private perspective, and all there is really to go on is the way that we, as an audience, identify with the man’s human predicament. Sewing a Button puts its finger on the ways we sometimes need to repair ourselves.

Factory International: Ai Weiwei: Button Up!, until 6 September 2026

Gabriel Gbadamosi

Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet, playwright, essayist and critic.