Inside Ai Weiwei’s gigantic Manchester artwork present, together with China detention recreation

“Button Up!”, Ai’s largest ever site-specific present, is being held at Aviva Studios, with adverts operating on town’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 occasion. It presents a particular Ai Weiwei menu that features dim sum – though Beijing-born Ai will not be Cantonese – and fortune cookies, unknown in China so probably a reference to the 12 years he spent within the United States. These have Ai quotes tucked inside. Mine stated: “The future belongs to those who question.”

The present is in The Warehouse – able to holding 5,000 individuals – and is, after all, huge. No marvel there’s an exclamation mark within the title: this exhibition is stuffed with stupendous statistics about Ai!

Gone are the single-digit days when his center finger offered concise commentary on Chinese and, later, worldwide websites. Now, as {the catalogue} places it, it’s all about “mass-manufactured material” being utilized by the artist “at incomprehensible scales to explore the theme of the individual’s relation to society”.

And so, within the centre of the large corridor there hangs a gleaming new work referred to as Eight-Nation Alliance Flags – Britain, France, United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (2024).

These flags of the nations that invaded China through the Boxer rebel (1899-1901) are constituted of about 300,000 buttons. Ai purchased them in 2015 from a producer in Croydon, London, who was offloading 30 tonnes of them.