Ai Weiwei unveiled ‘Button Up!’: monumental works that confront power and collective memory

Running from July 7th to September 6th, 2026, at Aviva Studios in Manchester, Ai Weiwei: Button Up! is the artist’s largest exhibition ever presented in Northern England. Featuring monumental installations, newly commissioned works, and major sculptures shown in the UK for the first time, the exhibition examines how history continues to shape politics, migration, and global inequality.

Created specifically for the industrial scale of Aviva Studios, the project takes Manchester—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—as its point of departure. Through sculpture, installation, and performance, Ai Weiwei traces two centuries of shared British and Chinese history, exploring empire, trade, industrialisation, censorship, and displacement. Porcelain, bronze, Murano glass, cotton, toy bricks, and millions of reclaimed buttons become carriers of memory, labour, and political history.

Ai Weiwei artworks: histories told through everyday materials

Among the exhibition’s defining works is Eight-Nation Alliance Flags, created especially for Button Up!, in which millions of reclaimed buttons form monumental banners representing the imperial coalition that invaded China in 1900. A humble fastening becomes a potent symbol of colonial power and its enduring legacy.

Nearby, Law of the Journey (2017) features a vast inflatable refugee boat crowded with anonymous figures, confronting the human reality behind the global migration crisis. Another centrepiece, Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), reconstructs a Ming dynasty temple from 1,500 original wooden elements, reflecting on heritage, preservation, and modernisation. A new version of History of Bombs, assembled from toy bricks, turns the language of childhood into a stark inventory of warfare.

Chinese artist recreates his own imprisonment

During the opening weekend, Ai Weiwei presents Sewing a Button, a 24-hour live performance marking fifteen years since his secret detention by Chinese authorities in 2011. Inside a reconstruction of his prison cell, he repeats the routines of confinement—sleeping, eating, exercising, writing, and enduring interrogation—while visitors observe at timed intervals.

Deeply personal yet unmistakably political, the performance turns lived experience into a reminder of how unchecked power continues to suppress individuals and societies. Blending biography, testimony, and endurance, Sewing a Button presents memory as an act of resistance.

For Ai Weiwei, every act of creation begins with the courage to question. In our Ai Weiwei interview, he discusses the inseparable bond between art and ideas, the responsibility of the artist, and the dialogue between reality and imagination.