Ai Weiwei at Button Up! Photo: Hugo Glendinning
As soon as you walk into Ai Weiwei’s new exhibition, you feel like you’ve stepped out of this world and become a mere speck in another. It’s dark, 21 metres high and largely absent of colour. A sombreness lingers in the air as an audio installation reads out the names of 5,197 schoolchildren killed in an earthquake in Sichuan in China in 2008. Sculptures and monuments that explore British imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, war and globalisation, made from materials such as bronze, compressed tea and Lego, stretch upwards and outwards. It's so expansive that there’s art no matter where you look.
Ai, born in 1957 in Beijing, is one of the world’s best-known living artists, as well as being a documentarian and an activist. His monumental conceptual works, critiques of the Chinese Communist regime, and 81-day prison detainment without charge (for “economic crimes”) saw him rise to international fame in the early 2010s. He has exhibited in the UK several times, most notably in the Unilever Series at the Tate Modern in 2011, when he filled the Turbine Hall with millions of individually sculpted and painted sunflower seeds. Button Up! at Manchester’s Factory International is his largest show in the north of England to date – and arguably his most intense.
Ai is one of the few artists unafraid to contend with politics, which will always be commendable. Does it sometimes feel like scale for scale’s sake? Yes
A History of Bombs is one of the first things to grab your gaze. The vast wall-based work is a catalogue of 50 lifesize bombs and missiles. Each of them is unique in shape and size, with the most powerful being displayed at the top. From afar, it looks slightly pixelated; up close, you realise it’s because it’s all made from tiny toy bricks. It’s easy poetry – a metaphor for how mass destruction is treated like gameplay by western powers – but being confronted with the innards of war is affecting.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, buttons are in abundance. In one newly created work, flags from the Eight-Nation Alliance – Britain, France, the US, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which invaded China in the early 20th century – are recreated using millions of buttons purchased from a now-closed factory in Croydon. The work also responds to Manchester’s industrial history as the “workshop of the world”, and attempts to draw links between industrial manufacturing, colonisation and capitalism. As ever with Ai’s work, the labour that goes into the construction is unfathomable, with each button hand-sewn by 33 artisans over 381 days. It’s impressive stuff.
Button Up! at Aviva studios in Manchester. Photo: Hugo Glendinning
One of the most dominating works in the space is a recreation of an ancestral wooden temple known as the Wang Family Ancestral Hall. Here, Ai is preserving traditional Chinese heritage and craftsmanship. Another prominent piece is a large black inflatable dinghy full of hundreds of “people” huddled next to one another. It’s mammoth at 100 metres long and hovers above the ground. It would be easy to dismiss this as didactic, or guilt-trippy, but it feels more like he is zooming in on a humanitarian tragedy that we have perhaps become desensitised to. Gov.uk reports that over the last seven days (at the time of writing), 617 people had attempted to cross the English Channel in small boats. The work is a reminder that this issue is still way too big to be ignored.
The weaknesses of the show are where the obvious is overstated or where the gag is immediate. In one work, Napoleon rides a zebra. This has been made using toy bricks and is flipped upside down. It’s a clear attempt to subvert propaganda imagery through humour, but it’s too basic to astound. Coloured Mirror sees an antique Qing dynasty mirror splashed with industrial paint. It’s inspired by conceptual pioneer Marcel Duchamp's “ready-made art”, but it’s pretty one-dimensional and adds little to the show but a bit of colour. The wall texts provide historical context but are sometimes literal to the point of patronising. “Empire is the term used to describe a group of countries, states or people ruled by one monarch or ruler,” one reads. Such hand-holding is unnecessary with work this unambiguous.
Ai is one of the few artists unafraid to contend with big ideas and politics, which will always be commendable. Does it sometimes feel like scale for scale’s sake? Yes. For example, La Commedia Umana, a macabre but intriguing chandelier featuring skulls, organs and security cameras, made during the Covid-19 pandemic, is “one of the largest works ever made in Murano glass”. Unless it’s trying to win a Guinness World Record, the value of the work shouldn’t be in its size but in its idea, especially if Ai is more invested in the concept than the final object, as he himself has suggested many times. Still, in a space this massive, perhaps Ai’s only option was to shout. Thankfully, his proclamations about the world, human rights, and empire are hard to disagree with.
Kadish Morris is a poet, critic and Nerve contributing writer. In 2020 she won the Eric Gregory prize awarded to poets under 30