Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Factory International presents Ai Weiwei: Button Up!—a major solo exhibition by the internationally renowned artist and activist exploring 200 years of global history, power and resistance.

The launch weekend will feature the world premiere of an exclusive, 24-hour durational live performance by Ai Weiwei himself. Sewing a Button marks the 15th anniversary of the artist’s secret detention by Public Security in China for 81 days in 2011. Ticket holders will gather before a reconfigurable cell, inside which the artist will restage and remix his experience, flanked by prison guards, interrogated by special guests and ‘dreaming’ overnight. His every movement will be broadcast via CCTV to screens both at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, and around the world.

In Button Up!, Ai Weiwei turns a lens toward the entangled legacies of British imperialism, relations between Britain and China, and the accelerating forces of globalisation. New commissions and existing large-scale artworks are intended to be encountered together as a unified environment that situates historical context within contemporary global dynamics.

At the heart of the exhibition is the world premiere of Eight-Nation Alliance Flags (2024)—a monumental installation composed of over four million buttons, salvaged from the British wholesaler A Brown & Co Buttons, which closed in 2019 after 104 years of trade.

Each flag represents one of the imperial powers that formed the Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United States and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) – an occupying force that invaded Beijing in 1900 during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion.

Ai Weiwei reimagines these emblems of military and colonial powers through a painstakingly assembled surface of hand-stitched buttons made from plastic, metal, pearl, olive wood and glass. Small, tactile and domestic, the buttons stand in contrast to the vast machinery of empire and war they collectively depict, invoking both the intimacy of labour and the weight of history.

History of Bombs (2019) is a vast mosaic made from over three and a half million toy bricks—his most ambitious use of the material so far. Developed from the artist’s research into modern weaponry, this new configuration presents the work as a total field—a full-scale map of human ingenuity and destruction, partly assembled by over 300 local volunteers.

New commissions sit alongside further UK premieres: Law of the Journey (2017), a 47m inflatable migrant boat containing hundreds of human figures and the artist’s largest artwork to date; Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), a Ming dynasty temple reassembled from 1,500 individual pieces; and La Commedia Umana (2017–21), a black Murano glass chandelier and ossuary of skeletal forms, weighing nearly three tonnes. Also on display is Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010).

Speaking about the exhibition, Ai Weiwei reflects: “I’m not interested in making very big things just for the sake of it. But in Manchester, that wonderful Warehouse space calls for monumental work. Visiting the city for this exhibition—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—and reflecting on Britain’s global territorial expansion made me realise I had to explore that history and understand how it connects to the forces driving today’s wars and global crises. The world today is deeply divided, with tragedy all around. Understanding history goes hand in hand with standing up for truth and justice.”

To coincide with the opening of Ai Weiwei: Button Up!, Factory International will host an artist talk with Ai Weiwei on July 2. The exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue and wider public programme. Curated by Kee Hong Low, with Curatorial Associate Phoebe Greenwood.