Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

I recently visited the Ai Weiwei exhibition Button Up! in Manchester, and was intrigued by the work on display. For those of you who don’t know of Ai Weiwei and his art and activism, let me tell you a little bit about his life and work - and show you around the exhibition.

History of Bombs 2019, 2025 Toy Bricks - an artwork investigating the brutality of wars and their damage to human life

The Wave Toy Bricks This work refences the Japanese artist Hokusai’s The Great Wave, but Ai Weiwei has included refugees in dinghies within the waves.

Law of the Journey 2017,2025 PVC metal Ai Weiwei and a team of collaborators investigated the global refugee crisis. The artwork his inflatable work - a reference to the rubber dinghies used by refugees

Eight-Nation Alliance Flags 2024 Buttons, fabric ‘Several years ago, I purchased a huge amount of buttons from A Brown & Co Buttons in Croydon by responding to their tweet. They were closing down after 104 years of trading. There are more than 6,000 kinds of buttons and they weigh 30 tonnes in total’.

Ai Weiwei writes: Visiting Manchester to research this exhibition, I was inspired to respond to the city’s industrial history as the ‘workshop of the world’ and found my purpose for my buttons.

These artworks reference the textile factories that made this city rich and the 1900-01 invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance - Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire - aimed at opening trade ports. The buttons, symbolic of industrial manufacturing, are transformed into large-scale graphics representing the flags of these eight nations. Creating these flags for Manchester invites us to connect the history with the present - to the dots between colonial history, imperialism, globalisation and today’s trade based and profit-driven capitalism.

Together these artworks represent hours of human labour. Each flag is composed of hundreds of buttons. They were made by 33 artisans in Shandong and took 281 days to complete. This is something that can only be realised in China.