Inside Ai Weiwei’s gigantic Manchester art show, including China detention recreation

“Button Up!”, Ai’s largest ever site-specific show, is being held at Aviva Studios, with ads running on the city’s buses and the artist’s face fluttering on banners from lamp posts.

Aviva Studios, which is run by arts organisation Factory International, has created a Chinese teahouse for the event. It offers a special Ai Weiwei menu that includes dim sum – although Beijing-born Ai is not Cantonese – and fortune cookies, unknown in China so possibly a reference to the 12 years he spent in the United States. These have Ai quotes tucked inside. Mine said: “The future belongs to those who question.”

The show is in The Warehouse – capable of holding 5,000 people – and is, of course, massive. No wonder there is an exclamation mark in the title: this exhibition is full of stupendous statistics about Ai!

Gone are the single-digit days when his middle finger provided concise commentary on Chinese and, later, international sites. Now, as the catalogue puts it, it is all about “mass-manufactured material” being used by the artist “at incomprehensible scales to explore the theme of the individual’s relation to society”.

And so, in the centre of the gigantic hall there hangs a gleaming new work called Eight-Nation Alliance Flags – Britain, France, United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (2024).

These flags of the nations that invaded China during the Boxer rebellion (1899-1901) are made from about 300,000 buttons. Ai bought them in 2015 from a manufacturer in Croydon, London, who was offloading 30 tonnes of them.