Alistair Hardaker | Image: Installation view of Ai Weiwei Button Up at Aviva Studios (Hugo Glendinning)
Ai Weiwei: Button Up! at Aviva Studios features works scaled to the Warehouse space, including two new commissions and a 24-hour performance.
Factory International is presenting what it describes as Ai Weiwei’s largest site-specific exhibition to date at Aviva Studios in Manchester, with the artist saying the scale of the venue’s Warehouse space shaped the work on show.
Ai Weiwei: Button Up! runs from 2 July to 6 September 2026. The exhibition explores the legacies of British imperialism, Chinese and British relations and the rise of globalisation, bringing together sculpture, painting, ceramics, film and live performance.
Ai Weiwei said: “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 exhibition features two new commissions created for the Warehouse space. Eight-Nation Alliance Flags is a work of eight flags, each made up of nearly half a million buttons, centred on the early 20th-century invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance. Ai Weiwei bought 30 tonnes of buttons from A Brown & Co Buttons in Croydon when it was closing down in 2019, and 4 million were used to create the flags in China.
The second commission, History of Bombs, is a toy brick mural featuring life-size models of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. At 25 metres wide and 10 metres high and featuring 3.5 million toy bricks, Factory International describes it as Ai Weiwei’s largest toy brick artwork. It develops an installation first displayed at the Imperial War Museum London in 2020.
The new commissions sit alongside works being shown in the UK for the first time: Law of the Journey (2017), a 49-metre-long inflatable migrant boat containing hundreds of human figures; Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), a Ming dynasty ancestral temple reassembled from 1,500 wooden pieces; and La Commedia Umana (2017-21), a black Murano glass chandelier of over 2,000 pieces weighing nearly 3 tonnes. Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010) is also on show.
John McGrath, artistic director and chief executive of Factory International, said: “Having the largest works of Ai Weiwei’s career shown alongside each other would only be possible in the vast, flexible space of Aviva Studios, and we are delighted that this extraordinary artist has responded so brilliantly to our venue.”
Ai Weiwei will also present a 24-hour performance piece, Sewing a Button, from 3 to 4 July. The work marks the 15th anniversary of the artist’s detention by Public Security in China for 81 days in 2011, and is the first time he has reenacted the experience live. Audiences will be able to watch him sleep, eat, exercise, write, wash and be interrogated, with elements of the footage shown on screens around Aviva Studios and broadcast online.
During the exhibition, the Social space at Aviva Studios will become a Chinese Tea Room, with a programme of talks, workshops and events.
