Ai Weiwei: Up button! Review – Skeletal chandeliers, a real temple – and lots of silly Lego toys | art

HThe story has been repeated throughout Ai Weiwei’s massive monumental sculpture exhibition in Manchester. Flags of long-lost nations hang from the ceiling, bronzes plundered by dead empires have been recast and reclaimed, and crumbling ancient ruins have been rebuilt. Everywhere you look here, you will find death, exploitation, greed and suffering throughout human history, brought to life and painfully displayed. The first thing you see is a black glass chandelier made of skeletons – The Human Comedy – and a wall covered with pictures of the most powerful bombs ever invented. Like a head on a stake, this is an art to warn.

This massive and ambitious exhibition is the Chinese artist at his greatest, and as a result at his most effective. His subject matter works best on a large scale, inflated, expansive, and in-your-face. The back wall of this warehouse is lined with a giant 100-meter inflatable boat filled with life jacket shapes. Do you think you can ignore the migrant crisis? Not here, you can’t, because Ai has taken a normal, everyday tragedy and made it into a monument. He has spent years interviewing hundreds of refugees, meeting people desperate for safety and a new life, and producing an enormous body of work on the subject. This is the culmination of this project. Is it a good looking work of art? Not really, but he makes a point, and makes it loud.

Which he does over and over again. His latest work hangs from the ceiling: house-sized flags sewn using tons of buttons he bought from a bankrupt English button factory. The flags represent the alliance of eight countries – including Britain, the United States, Japan, France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that invaded China in 1900 in an attempt to reopen its ports. He wove narratives of industrialization, colonialism, and historical violence together into a complex picture of modern history. Look at these empires, look at what they have done to each other, look at which ones have risen and which have fallen and try to calculate the cost. Flags look and feel heavy, burdened by history and its continuing influence.

It’s not the only history he’s trying to keep alive here. The most visually impressive work is the Ancestral Hall of the Wang family, an actual temple found crumbling to ruin in the Jiangxi countryside, and reassembled piece by piece here. It is a towering window into the past, onto values ​​long lost, to a time before industrialization and rampant capitalism, when China was weak and vulnerable to attack. Beneath the temple’s columns, there are boxes containing pages of Chinese history – hidden, inaccessible narratives.

In the center of the temple, three dollhouses sit on a bed of brown mulch. It’s all made from Pu’er tea, dark pressed leaves that gain value with age and fermentation. They are symbols of Chinese culture, togetherness, communal and Taoist values, but also symbols of wealth and its accumulation. We learned that “drink a cup of tea” is now a euphemism for dragging people in for questioning by Chinese state police. It’s the best work here, yet – full of conflicting, fascinating connotations from past and present, assembled into something beautiful, fragrant, and powerfully symbolic. A simple substance turned into something devastating.

Not all is well here, unfortunately. When Ai takes Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Napoleon, replaces his horse with a zebra and hangs it upside down, the symbolism is so heavy that it seems as if Banksy did it. It’s the same thing when Ai puts the migrant boats on Hokusai’s great wave. We get it: colonialism is bad, nationalism is evil, immigration is a crisis, but you’ve already made the point elsewhere, and made it better. His use of Lego too – both images are mosaics made of toy bricks, as in the history of bombs – seems too obvious, basic, inaccurate and silly.

But when Ai is good, his work has an emotional impact that few artists can match. He treats history as a warning and a road map: all the injustices we face today can be explained and traced back to moments in the past. If you want to understand the migrant crisis, the collapse of late-stage capitalism, or the rise of authoritarianism, look only to the endless horrors our ancestors suffered. This whole show is a plea, perhaps intentionally ineffective, to listen to those lessons before it’s too late.