{"id":243584,"date":"2026-01-21T02:19:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/243584\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T02:19:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:19:16","slug":"why-ai-weiwei-shipped-30-tonnes-of-buttons-from-croydon-to-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/243584\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Ai Weiwei shipped 30 tonnes of buttons from Croydon to China"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Ai Weiwei first acquired 30 tonnes of buttons from a defunct factory in south London seven years ago, even the art world could not have perhaps foreseen the clandestine and personal journey they would go on to take.<\/p>\n

Now the mystery can finally be revealed. The buttons were surreptitiously shipped to China to be crafted in secrecy by villagers into an enormous artwork that is about to appear in Manchester.<\/p>\n

The buttons from a 100-year-old London business forced to close in 2019 have been turned by the Chinese dissident artist into a monumental work, made in the country he has been exiled from<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Comprised of 9,000 different types of button sewn into \u201cnetting\u201d to create eight flags with a combined width of 60 metres and height of 38 metres, the artwork is due to take centre stage in this year\u2019s Manchester cultural season.<\/p>\n

It is to be joined in the city\u2019s artistic \u201cwarehouse\u201d by an equally monumental new Ai artwork containing more than 3.5 million Lego pieces, which at 24m by 9m will be twice the length and height of a double-decker bus.<\/p>\n

Ai\u2019s first-ever exhibition in the north of England has gone towards answering the question of why in 2019 the exiled artist had collected the entire 30-tonne stock of A Brown and Co Buttons, which had gone bust after a century of trading in Croydon. <\/p>\n

\"Ai<\/p>\n

After mulling over them in his Berlin studio for several years, Ai secretly shipped the 30 tonnes of buttons to a village in China\u2019s Shandong province, where he tasked a team of female artisans with adopting their traditional practices to create the new work.<\/p>\n

Ai, who was previously imprisoned by the Chinese authorities and has lived in exile in Europe for many years, could only oversee the artwork\u2019s creation by videos sent from China with the huge \u201cbutton flags\u201d being hung from a crane in the village.<\/p>\n

\"Interior<\/p>\n

The factory closed after 100 years in business<\/p>\n

Low Kee Hong, the creative director of Factory International which is behind the Manchester<\/a> season, said that the buttons were very \u201cpersonal\u201d and held extraordinary significance for Ai, who had recounted waiting a month while imprisoned in China to secure approval for a needle and thread when the one on his trousers had fallen off, \u201cand even then armed guards came in and stood watching him\u201d.<\/p>\n

After growing up during a life of material scarcity, if a button fell off an item of clothing Ai saw it as a huge loss because finding a replacement was of great difficulty. <\/p>\n

Kee Hong said: \u201cFor the longest time he [Ai] did not know what to do with the buttons until we had a conversation about making a show in Manchester. He was fully aware of Manchester\u2019s role in the Industrial Revolution and it was a window through which he could start to think what it could be about.\u201d<\/p>\n

John McGrath, Factory International\u2019s chief executive, said that the scale of Ai\u2019s ambitions for the exhibition, which opens in July in its Aviva Studios home, recalled the artist\u2019s iconic display of 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern 15 years ago.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\u201cSunflower Seeds\u201d at the Tate Modern<\/p>\n

PETER MACDIARMID\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cHe has taken these very small objects and created something massive and of scale. With this huge reservoir of buttons that he rescued [from south London] he is looking at how the eight nations of the alliance forcibly opened up China and relating that to these small differences in manufacturing and clothing that happened around the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work, Eight-Nation Alliance Flag, depicts with thousands of buttons the flags of the members of a multi-national coalition that invaded China during its 1900 Boxer Rebellion against foreign imperialism: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United States and Austria-Hungary.<\/p>\n

As soon as the Chinese artisans had finished the work it was shipped out of China to Manchester, with the artist finally seeing it with the naked eye in March last year.<\/p>\n

For his new Lego work, which will be his largest ever when finished, Ai deployed hundreds of students in Manchester to recreate a 2D version of one of his most famous works History of Bombs with \u201ctoy bricks\u201d. A 3D iteration of the piece was displayed at IWM London in 2020.<\/p>\n

\"Ai<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory of Bombs\u201d<\/p>\n

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE<\/p>\n

McGrath said that there had been \u201cassembly lines of volunteers\u201d assembling the bricks within Aviva Studios to make it, adding that the artist was \u201creally interested in the labour that goes in and how that relates to the history of industrialisation both in Manchester and China\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ai said he had not been \u201cinterested in making very big things just for the sake of it\u201d, but adding that the \u201cwonderful Warehouse space calls for monumental work\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ai Weiwei reveals Lego recreation of Monet\u2019s water lilies at Design Museum<\/a><\/p>\n

He said: \u201cVisiting the city for this exhibition, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and reflecting on Britain\u2019s global territorial expansion made me realise I had to explore that history and understand how it connects to the forces driving today\u2019s wars and global crises.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kee Hong said that the buttons were \u201cpart of a personal journey\u201d for the artist, with Ai remembering that when his brother left his childhood home to study, his friends passed him a handful of buttons as a leaving gift.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are both practical and remind you of home,\u201d Kee Hong explained. <\/p>\n

The exhibition, Ai Weiwei: Button Up! opens on July 2 and is due to run until September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Ai Weiwei first acquired 30 tonnes of buttons from a defunct factory in south London seven years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-243584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}