AI WEIWEI: BUTTON UP!
From an Idea to Nine Monumental Flags
Three Years in the Making, 2023–2026
Presented at Aviva Studios, Manchester, 2026
From 2023 to 2026, AI+ Gallery worked with Ai Weiwei on the realization of nine monumental button flags for Button Up! at Aviva Studios in Manchester.
Beginning with the sourcing of buttons and textiles, the three-year project evolved through material experimentation, intricate handwork, large-scale fabrication, logistics, and final exhibition installation.
Approximately 40 people contributed to the production, with AI+ Gallery coordinating the process of translating Ai Weiwei’s designs from concept into physical form.
THE BEGINNING
It Started with a Button
The project began with an ordinary object: the button.
At Ai Weiwei’s request, the initial buttons were discovered and acquired in the United Kingdom, echoing the country's profound textile heritage. From there, tens of thousands of these materials were carefully packed and shipped across continents to China.
Working closely with Ai Weiwei, AI+ Gallery took on the critical next stage: coordinating the supplementary textiles and materials in China, organizing the immense material inventory, and mobilizing an artisanal team to begin the meticulous fabrication process.
What initially appeared to be a straightforward shipment of materials gradually became the beginning of a monumental undertaking—a cross-continental journey that transformed British-sourced buttons into nine hand-stitched, large-scale flags of living history.
MATERIAL
Thousands of Ordinary Objects
For Ai Weiwei, materials often carry meanings beyond their physical function.
Buttons belong to everyday life. They are small, inexpensive, mass-produced objects, closely tied to clothing, global manufacturing, manual labor, and the human body.
Through relentless accumulation and the dedication of hand-stitching, tens of thousands of these individual pieces were pierced, threaded, and sewn one by one. Through this pure manual labor, ordinary everyday fasteners transcended their utility, acquiring an entirely new scale, physical presence, and sculptural power.
THE IDEA
From Material to History
As the project developed, Ai Weiwei transformed the button from an everyday object into a visual language for examining history, power, national identity, and collective memory.
The designs evolved into a series of monumental flags referencing a complex historical moment surrounding China and the foreign powers involved in the Eight-Nation Alliance at the turn of the twentieth century.
National symbols, reconstructed through thousands of individual buttons and hand-worked textiles, became a way of bringing history into the present.
MAKING
Three Years. Nine Flags. Forty People.
Realizing the works required an entirely different kind of process.
Over three years, approximately 40 people contributed to the production. AI+ Gallery coordinated material sourcing, fabrication, detailed handwork, quality control, logistics, and the many practical challenges involved in producing works at this scale.
Thousands of individual buttons had to be selected, positioned, attached, adjusted, and assembled by hand. What appears from a distance as a single image is, up close, the result of countless individual gestures.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE WORK
Forty People, Thousands of Gestures
Behind the scale of the finished works was a deeply human process.Each flag passed through many hands. The making required repetition, concentration, patience, judgment, and collaboration across a team working toward a single artistic vision.The traces of that labor remain embedded in the finished works.
SCALE
When the Image Emerges
During production, the works could only be understood in fragments: a section of fabric, a field of buttons, a hand completing one small area at a time.
Only when the flags were fully assembled did the scale of Ai Weiwei’s designs become visible.
Thousands of individual components had become a single monumental image.
BUTTON UP!
Aviva Studios, Manchester
In 2026, the nine monumental button flags were presented as part of Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! exhibition at Aviva Studios in Manchester.
Installed within the vast architectural space, works that had existed for years as drawings, materials, fragments, and works in progress were finally experienced at their intended scale.
The journey from individual buttons to monumental flags was complete.