MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
The Artist's Most Expansive Northern Show
Ai Weiwei's "Button Up!" opens Thursday at Aviva Studios, the striking new home of Factory International in Manchester, and organizers are not undercutting the scale of the ambition: it is being billed as the most expansive presentation of the artist's work in the north of England to date, filling the Warehouse, the venue's vast column-free performance space, with new and existing large-scale works never before shown together in the UK.
The exhibition runs from July 2 through September 6, giving Manchester nearly two months to sit with a show explicitly designed to confront two centuries of history — specifically the entangled, often violent relationship between Britain and China, and the systems of trade, empire, and industrial exploitation that Ai Weiwei argues still shape the humanitarian and political crises of the present day.
The Secret Life of Thirty Tons of Buttons
The origin story behind the show's central material is almost stranger than the finished artwork. Since 2019, Ai Weiwei has quietly held onto 30 tons of buttons rescued from A Brown & Co Buttons, a historic Croydon button factory that was shutting its doors for good. Rather than let that mountain of manufacturing history go to landfill, the artist purchased it outright and, in a detail that reads like a plot point from a heist film, arranged for the buttons to be secretly shipped to China, where local craftspeople began the painstaking work of transforming them into art.
That six-year gestation period has finally produced its first public results: eight monumental flags, each woven from roughly 9,000 buttons sewn into netting using traditional Chinese textile techniques. Titled "Eight-Nation Alliance Flag," the works take their name from the historical coalition of eight foreign powers — including Britain — that militarily intervened in China at the turn of the twentieth century, a reference point Ai Weiwei uses to draw a direct line between colonial-era trade violence and the geopolitical tensions still playing out today.
History of Bombs, Rebuilt
Alongside the button flags, "Button Up!" debuts a new version of Ai Weiwei's widely exhibited "History of Bombs" — previously realized as a floor installation and, in earlier iterations, in Lego brick form. The Manchester version pushes that toy-brick approach to its most colossal scale yet: a construction spanning roughly 80 feet, mapping the history of explosive weaponry through the deliberately childlike medium of interlocking plastic bricks, a tension between playful material and devastating subject matter that has become one of the defining moves of Ai Weiwei's late career.
The choice of Manchester as the show's home is not incidental. In comments provided ahead of the opening, Ai Weiwei explained his thinking directly: "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."
A Live Performance Piece Nobody Has Seen Before
Running alongside the main exhibition, Ai Weiwei is staging "Sewing a Button," an unflinching 24-hour live performance in which the artist re-enacts, for the first time publicly, his secret detention by Chinese authorities in 2011 — an 81-day disappearance that became one of the defining episodes of his decades-long conflict with the Chinese state and turned him into one of the most internationally recognized symbols of artistic dissent. Pairing that deeply personal, endurance-based performance with the industrial scale of the button flags and the Lego bomb installation gives the show two very different registers: the intimate trauma of state surveillance sitting alongside a sweeping historical indictment of empire.
Why Manchester, Why Now
Factory International has increasingly positioned Aviva Studios as a home for large-scale, politically engaged international art that London's more traditional institutions might hesitate to platform at this scale, and "Button Up!" fits squarely into that mandate. The show also arrives amid renewed global attention to trade tensions between Western nations and China, giving Ai Weiwei's specific framing — using literal manufacturing detritus from a shuttered British factory to indict two centuries of trade violence — an unusually direct contemporary resonance.
What This Means for Visitors
For gallery-goers, "Button Up!" offers a rare chance to see Ai Weiwei working at true monumental scale outside London, in a venue purpose-built to hold work this large. Visitors should expect a show that demands time: the button flags reward close inspection of their handcraft, the Lego bomb installation is meant to be walked around in its entirety, and the accompanying 24-hour performance piece will only be experienced in full by those willing to return across its full duration. For anyone interested in how contemporary art processes historical trauma and industrial legacy, this is likely to be one of the most talked-about design and art events in the UK this summer.
The Bottom Line
Six years after quietly rescuing 30 tons of discarded buttons from a dying British factory, Ai Weiwei has turned manufacturing waste into a monumental meditation on empire, trade, and war. "Button Up!" is both a technical spectacle and a pointed argument — that the systems built during the Industrial Revolution never really disappeared, they just changed shape.
