Ai Weiwei: Button Up! at Aviva Studios

History, power and empire collide in Button Up! – Aviva Studios’ major new exhibition by the world-leading artist and activist, Ai Weiwei.

Conceptual artist, political dissident, and long-standing critic of state power, Ai Weiwei makes art that often operates like evidence – evidence of how authority is constructed, how labour is obscured, and how accountability is diffused. Over the past two decades, he’s increasingly turned meticulous research into large-scale installation, assembling everyday objects until systems of production and control come into view. In Button Up!, that method is applied to two centuries of Chinese and British relations, with Manchester – a city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution – acting as both subject and setting.

Conceived as a total environment, Button Up! brings together new and existing large-scale works, including pieces shown in the UK for the first time. Porcelain, cotton, glass, bronze, buttons and toy bricks recur throughout the exhibition – materials bound up with manufacture, trade and consumption. Together, they trace globalisation not as an abstract idea, but as a system built from tangible things. In Manchester, a city shaped by industrial production and global exchange, those materials carry particular weight.

The logic of Weiwei’s practice can be traced back to early life. Born in Beijing in 1957, his father – the poet Ai Qing – was labelled a “rightist” during the Maoist campaigns, and the family lived in exile for nearly two decades. Returning to Beijing after the Cultural Revolution, Weiwei enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy before leaving for New York in the early 1980s. There, exposure to Andy Warhol and conceptual art helped shape a practice rooted in documentation, elevating the ordinary and treating facts, materials and systems as the raw material of art. This approach would later bring him into direct conflict with the Chinese state, resulting in censorship, surveillance and restrictions on his ability to work and travel.

Central to the exhibition are two major new commissions created for the Warehouse at Aviva Studios. The world premiere of Eight-Nation Alliance Flags, made from hundreds of thousands of buttons, references the coalition of foreign powers that intervened in China during the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century. National emblems are rebuilt using a small, repeatable component of industrial manufacture, placing the iconography of empire alongside the ordinary materials global systems rely on.

A comparable logic runs through a new version of History of Bombs, Ai Weiwei’s largest toy-brick artwork to date, stretching 25 metres wide and 10 metres high, and constructed from 3.5 million toy bricks. Images of modern warfare are rendered through a standardised, mass-produced material, placing scenes of violence within the same systems of manufacture and distribution that underpin everyday life. Revisited for Button Up!, the work functions as an accumulating record, reflecting histories of conflict that remain unresolved. Displayed alongside it, Law of the Journey (2017) – a 49-metre inflatable vessel carrying hundreds of anonymous figures, on show in the UK for the first time – makes explicit what the piece implies: the human displacement that sits downstream of manufactured violence.

Alongside these new commissions sit two of Weiwei’s most recognisable existing works. The astonishing Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015) – a Ming dynasty ancestral temple dismantled and reassembled from 1,500 original timber pieces – anchors the show’s older, more contemplative register. Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010), Weiwei’s best-known reinterpretation of the Chinese zodiac, is on show too. Factory International are careful to note that Button Up! isn’t a retrospective – but readers hoping for a glimpse of the career-defining pieces will still find them here.

Ai Weiwei has described the Warehouse at Aviva Studios as a space that “calls for monumental work”, while pointing to Manchester’s role in the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s global expansion as key to the exhibition. In that context, Button Up! works both as a title and a provocation – a playful nod to the artist’s ongoing battle with censorship, and a reminder of the pressures that shape what can be said, shown and remembered. Displayed in a city forged through industry and global trade, the exhibition makes visible the systems of production and power that remain embedded in everyday life.