At Factory International, Ai Weiwei turns history into a physical environment. On view until 6 September 2026, “Ai Weiwei: Button Up!” is the artist’s most expansive presentation in the North to date, a monumental exhibition that brings together new and existing works in an exploration of two centuries of Chinese and British relations.
Known for an artistic practice that refuses to separate aesthetics from political reality, Ai Weiwei has spent decades questioning the systems that shape individual lives. His own history, from childhood exile to secret detention in China, remains inseparable from a body of work that has consistently confronted power, censorship, displacement and the structures of control hidden within everyday life.
For “Button Up!”, Manchester becomes a point of departure. A city shaped by the Industrial Revolution, its history offers a framework through which the exhibition examines the long afterlife of trade, empire and exploitation. The past does not remain behind the objects on display. It continues to appear in the humanitarian and political crises of the present.
Conceived as a total environment, the exhibition brings together large-scale works made from porcelain, cotton, glass, bronze, buttons and toy bricks. Each material carries its own history of invention, labour, desire and consumption. Together, they form a fragmented portrait of globalisation, a system built from the movement of people, objects and ideas, but also from the unequal structures that determine who pays for that movement.
In Ai Weiwei‘s hands, the ordinary becomes historical. A button, a brick, a fragment of porcelain or a piece of cotton can become evidence of a much larger system.
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