We spoke to the artist, activist and bona-fide legend on the eve of his Aviva Studios exhibition 'Button Up!' Just don't call it a retrospective...
Ai Weiwei is one of the world’s most famous contemporary artists. His latest exhibition – the biggest the North has ever seen – is called Ai Weiwei: Button Up!, and it’s just landed at the fittingly-large warehouse space in Manchester’s Aviva Studios, the home of art production company Factory International.
A combination of some of his most famous pieces from across his lengthy career (he first emerged as a conceptual artist speaking out against Chinese state censorship in the early 1980s), the show also includes brand-new commission, as well as a plastic brick reworking of one of his most iconic works.
Organisers are keen to stress it’s very much not a retrospective, and while it’s an impressive compendium of his career in art and activism, it’s also a whole experience in itself. Stepping into the 143,000 square foot warehouse room is breathtaking. The sheer scale of it actually warrants that word.
Though Weiwei doesn’t go large just for the sake of it: “Space is nothing charming. It’s challenging. You have to fulfil a lot. You have to keep it alive.” In other words, these are ideas that need to go big.
Looking at 200 years of British-Chinese relations, pieces include Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015) a painstaking recreation of a Ming dynasty temple made from 1,500 individual wooden pieces, and Law of the Journey (2017), a 49m long inflatable migrant boat containing hundreds of human figures – deliberately so vast you can’t take it all in from one vantage point alone.
Also on show is Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010), a re-envisioning of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. Seeing any one of these alone would be remarkable, together, it’s something else entirely.
The show isn’t here by accident, the exhibition was conceived with Manchester – and the impossibly large warehouse at Aviva Studios – specifically in mind. “I started to study Manchester,” he told Manchester’s Finest. “I realised it was the first industrial location. I think that is very crucial.”
The new works made specially for the show include Eight-Nation Alliance Flags, a monumental work of eight hand-embellished fabric panels.
The flags, which are the size of buildings, each symbolise a different nation which invaded China in 1900: Britain; France; the USA; Germany; Japan; Russia; Italy; and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The flags are adorned with four million buttons which Weiwei acquired almost by accident, the effect being jewel-like. “I have 30 tonnes of buttons from a British button company who announced bankruptcy,” he said.
He hoarded them for a while with no plan of what to do with them, until he did. “I don’t choose materials, materials choose me”, he explains.
Buttons, to Weiwei, are ‘playful, friendly’, but they also invoke censorship – keeping things quiet, shut up, buttoned down, something explored further in the performance element of proceedings, called Sewing a Button.
On Friday 3 – Saturday 4 July the artist will undertake a 24-hour performance re-enacting scenes from his 81-day long secret detention by Chinese authorities, which took place in 2011. It was in part devised by Factory International artistic director Kee Hong Low, who has also curated the show.
Various well known journalists, broadcasters and writers like Nihal Arthanayake and Lemn Sissay will play the roles of his interrogators in a world-first, where visitors can watch the challenging undertaking for the whole 24 hours, if they wish.
If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. “It’s difficult emotionally, and even physically, but I said I want to do it.” Weiwei said the performance was not only about his own experience of detention, but about the continued use of state power around the world.
“That’s not just my personal story,” he said. “It’s not just that I was secretly detained for 81 days.” He speaks about suppression and censorship around the world, like the imprisonment of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by the US. “So for me, 24 hours is nothing.”
So where should you begin, if you come and visit? Weiwei doesn’t really mind. “As an artist, I’m pretty arrogant. I cannot really seek successful communication. It’s just hard work” he says.
He just wants you to come and see it.
Ai Weiwei: Button Up! is on at Aviva Studios, Home of Factory International, until 6 September. Book tickets here.
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