Inside Ai Weiwei’s gigantic Manchester art show, including China detention recreation

The show is in The Warehouse – capable of holding 5,000 people – and is, of course, massive. No wonder there is an exclamation mark in the title: this exhibition is full of stupendous statistics about Ai!

Gone are the single-digit days when his middle finger provided concise commentary on Chinese and, later, international sites. Now, as the catalogue puts it, it is all about “mass-manufactured material” being used by the artist “at incomprehensible scales to explore the theme of the individual’s relation to society”.

And so, in the centre of the gigantic hall there hangs a gleaming new work called Eight-Nation Alliance Flags – Britain, France, United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (2024).

These flags of the nations that invaded China during the Boxer rebellion (1899-1901) are made from about 300,000 buttons. Ai bought them in 2015 from a manufacturer in Croydon, London, who was offloading 30 tonnes of them.