Ai Weiwei takes over Manchester’s Aviva Studios with Button Up!

Ai Wei Wei’s largest site-specific exhibition to date is open, but it’s not where you might expect. The internationally renowned artist and activist has had major shows around the world, among them some of London’s most prestigious institutions including the Design Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and his memorable Sunflower Seeds commission at Tate Modern, made up of millions of hand-crafted porcelain seeds.

Ai Weiwei at Ai Weiwei Button Up. Photo credit Hugo Glendinning

But Ai Weiwei: Button Up! has taken residency up north and is being presented by Factory International at Manchester’s Aviva Studios this summer. As the artist underlines, this is – like all of his work, intentional. There is nothing here so abstract as to be without reason. Monumental in scale and ambition, the exhibition explores the legacies of British imperialism, hundreds of years of Chinese and British relations and the rise of globalisation. So, it makes perfect sense that it should be presented in Manchester, a central powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution.

“I’m not interested in making very big things just for the sake of it,” Ai says. “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.” 

Installation view of Ai Weiwei Button Up at Aviva Studios. Photo credit Hugo Glendinning

Ai Weiwei: Button Up! explores how historic systems of trade, empire and exploitation resonate in today’s humanitarian and political crises. Big themes are made manifest in big artworks. As the artist says himself, bigness is not the point in itself. But there is a sense of urgency in the enormous works being so physically inescapable in the overall experience of the show. Structures visually overlap and there is no respite.

Installation view of Ai Weiwei Button Up at Aviva Studios. Photo credit Hugo Glendinning

Both global and personal, the title Button Up! is a playful poke at the artist’s ongoing battle with censorship. The exhibition features some of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic works, spanning the breadth of the dissident artist’s practice and bringing together monumental sculpture, painting, ceramics, film and live performance. Many are going on show in the UK for the first time: Law of the Journey (2017), the artist’s largest artwork to date and his only inflatable work, a 49m long migrant boat containing hundreds of human figures; Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), a Ming dynasty ancestral temple reassembled from 1,500 individual wooden pieces; and La Commedia Umana (2017-21), a black Murano glass chandelier made up of over 2,000 pieces and weighing nearly 3 tonnes. Also on show is Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010), a re-envisioning of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. 

Installation view of Ai Weiwei Button Up at Aviva Studios. Photo credit Hugo Glendinning

But what is exciting about this site-specific show is the new commissions, seeing Ai Weiwei as he so often does crystallise meaning through material. Created specifically for the vast Warehouse space of Aviva Studios, Eight-Nation Alliance Flags is a monumental work of eight flags, shimmering but at the same time heavy – old curtains carrying the weight of history. It centres on the history of the early 20th-century invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance: Britain; France; United States of America; Germany; Japan; Russia; Italy; and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Each flag is made up of nearly half a million buttons – four million buttons in total, all purchased by the artist in a 30-tonne lot from A Brown & Co Buttons in Croydon, when it was closing down in 2019.  

Installation view of Ai Weiwei Button Up at Aviva Studios. Photo credit Hugo Glendinning

History of Bombs is a new development of an installation first displayed the Imperial War Museum London in 2020. Here, it becomes a colossal new toy brick mural that features 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, it is Ai Weiwei’s largest ever toy brick artwork, and was made by volunteers in Manchester and craftspeople in China.

Installation view of Ai Weiwei Button Up at Aviva Studios. Photo credit Hugo Glendinning

Around the exhibition you hear the powerful, relentless audio artwork Nian Nian (Commemoration)(2021), a recording of volunteers reciting the names of 5,197 schoolchildren killed in an earthquake in Sichuan, China, in 2008. Ai cites this tragedy as the event that transformed him from an artist into a political figure. In the aftermath, he travelled to earthquake-devastated areas to document the names of the victims and collect evidence to prove that school buildings had collapsed due to weak construction. Despite police harassment, the names were compiled and published on Ai’s blog, which would lead him and many of his team to be held in secret detention in 2011.

For 81 days, he was held without charge, a time period which – 15 years later – is condensed into a unique 24-hour performance piece Sewing a Button which runs 3 to 4 July. Audiences will be able to watch Ai Weiwei sleep, eat, exercise, write, wash and be interrogated. Elements of the footage will be shown in screens around Aviva Studios, as well as broadcast online to reach audiences around the world. This is the first time the artist has re-enacted his experience live.  

Date: 2 July– 6 September 2026 (closed Mondays). Location: The Warehouse, Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester, M3 4JQ. Price: from £15. Book now

Programme events

Ai Weiwei: Artist Talk

2 July 2026; Standard tickets from £25. Concessions and limited Aviva £10 tickets available. Book now

Sewing a Button 

5pm on 3 July – 5pm on 4 July 2026: Tickets from £15; 24-hour ticket £68. Concessions and limited Aviva £10 tickets available. Book now

By Tani Burns