Four Million Buttons: Ai Weiwei Fills a Manchester Warehouse

There is a particular kind of ambition that only really works at scale, and Ai Weiwei has always understood it. Anyone who filed into Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010 to walk across a field of one hundred million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds knows the trick: take an object so small it barely registers, multiply it into the millions, and let the sheer accumulation do the arguing. This summer that instinct has travelled north. At Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester, the Chinese artist has opened Button Up!, described as his largest site-specific exhibition to date, and it runs until 6 September.

A city chosen for a reason

Manchester is not a neutral backdrop here, and Ai has been explicit about why he wanted it. This was the engine room of the Industrial Revolution, a city built on cotton, on the machinery of trade, and on an empire whose reach shaped the lives of people thousands of miles away. Ai uses that history as the exhibition’s spine. Button Up! sets out to trace centuries of Chinese and British relations and the long shadow of British imperialism, asking how the systems of trade, empire and extraction that made cities like Manchester rich still echo in today’s political and humanitarian crises.

It is a heavy theme to hang on something as domestic and unassuming as a button, which is rather the point. The centrepiece is a suite of eight enormous flags, together assembled from close to four million buttons. Ai bought the lot — some thirty tonnes of them — from A Brown & Co, a button manufacturer in Croydon, when the firm closed down in 2019. There is a neat, almost mournful logic to that provenance: the raw material of the work is itself a relic of a British manufacturing trade that no longer exists, salvaged rather than made.

The politics of the very small

The flags belong to a new commission Ai calls the Eight-Nation Alliance, referring to the coalition of imperial powers that intervened in China during the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century. By rebuilding those national emblems out of discarded buttons, Ai draws a line from the plunder of the colonial era to what he describes as a contemporary “neo-colonialism” — the continued pressure exerted by powerful states on weaker ones, reshaping how ordinary people live. It is characteristic of his method that the argument arrives through material and repetition rather than through text on a wall.

That method has its admirers and its sceptics, and this show has drawn out both. The scale and craftsmanship are hard to dispute; several reviewers have found the installations genuinely breathtaking to stand inside. Others are less persuaded, with at least one notice arguing that for all its monumentality the work struggles to land a precise political point. Both responses are worth holding onto if you go. Ai’s art has long lived in the tension between spectacle and statement, and part of the interest of Button Up! is watching that tension play out in real time across a cavernous former warehouse space.

Why this matters beyond London

For readers who track where the cultural weather is coming from, the Manchester setting is as significant as the art. Factory International, the organisation behind the Manchester International Festival, opened Aviva Studios in 2023 as a permanent home built specifically for work that will not fit anywhere else, and a project of this scale is exactly what the building was designed to hold. That a show of this ambition is opening in the North rather than the capital says something encouraging about the geography of serious contemporary art in Britain right now.

It also sits within an unusually rich summer for exhibitions outside London. Plymouth is showing Gillian Ayres: A Life in Colour, bringing together twenty-six canvases that span seven decades of the British abstractionist’s fearless, high-key painting. Edinburgh has The Void Presses The Wall, a major outing for the London-based Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild, whose work is built around the bodily experience of sharing a room with an object. Taken together, these shows are a reminder that the most rewarding art of any given month is rarely confined to a single postcode.

Going to see it

If you make the trip, give yourself time and space. Ai’s installations reward slow looking; the meaning tends to accumulate the way the buttons do, one small thing at a time, until the whole thing tips into something larger. Stand close enough to see the individual fasteners, then step back until they dissolve into an image, and you will have experienced in a few seconds the exact movement — from the personal to the systemic — that the whole exhibition is trying to make.

Whether you leave convinced by Ai’s politics or merely impressed by his stamina, Button Up! is the kind of show that justifies a train ticket. It is on at Aviva Studios in Manchester until 6 September, and it is, if nothing else, a genuinely northern spectacle worth crossing the country for.