In the 15 years since his 81-day detention by China’s Ministry of Public Security, artist and dissident artist Ai Weiwei has explicitly addressed the harrowing experience in his work. This summer, he will do so again, in what will likely be the most demanding presentation to date.
As part of his site-specific exhibition called “Button Up!” at Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester, England, Ai will present Sewing a Button, a 24-hour performance piece in which he will reenact his detention. The performance will activate a re-creation of Ai’s cell, which measured 7.2 meters by 3.6 meters (about 23.6 feet by 11.8 feet).
Sewing a Button, scheduled to start at 5 p.m. on July 3 and running until July 4, will take place the day after the opening of “Button Up!” on July 2. Visitors will be able to book two-hour slots, as well as a full 24-hour ticket that allows them to come and go, to see the performance. (Some of the footage will also be broadcast online.)
Sewing a Button will involve watching Ai “sleep, eat, exercise, write, wash and be interrogated,” as well as “observe Weiwei, like the guards could, through footage from 3 CCTV cameras,” according to a release.
Sewing a Button is in many ways a follow-up to Ai’s acclaimed work S.A.C.R.E.D. (2013), which he debuted at the Zuecca Project Space in Venice during the 2013 Biennale and which has since traveled internationally. For that work, Ai created six different dioramas that re-created his time in detention, featuring fiberglass sculptures of the artist and his guards. The work’s title refers to each of the six tableaux he made for the work: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy, Doubt.
That same year, he also released a heavy-metal music video about his detention titled Dumbass, which he described to the Guardian at the time as “a kind of self-therapy.” The work, he told the New York Times, is “not really about me. I think it’s about how the power of the state tries to manage and maintain this kind of control.”
In addition to Sewing a Button, Factory International has commissioned two other works by Ai: Eight-Nation Alliance Flags, a collection of flags made up of buttons, and a new version of History of Bombs, a mural made up of toy bricks. These works join several other large-scale works, some of which are being shown in the UK for the first time: Law of the Journey (2017), Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), La Commedia Umana (2017–21), and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010).
The exhibition, according to a description, “confronts 200 years of power, trade, war, culture and Empire that have shaped relations between Britain and China,” while Sewing a Button “distils these forces into a frighteningly intimate human story.”
