History of Bombs
Toy Bricks2019, 2025
The toy-brick version of The History of Bombs mural measures 25m wide and 10m high and has been hand-built by volunteers from Greater Manchester and Ai Weiwei's studio.
Constructed from over 3.5 million toy bricks, it’s the largest toy-brick mosaic in the world. The mural features life-size, pixelated 2D depictions of 50 of the most powerful and destructive weapons known to humankind, from historical conventional weapons to weapons of mass destruction.
History of Bombs is about the essential facts of our modern history. The work focuses on our human capacity for destruction; how we attempt to solve political, religious, and economic crises through the use of explosives, which is against any humanity and rationality. Today, we have many more bombs with unthinkably destructive power, capable of reducing civilization to dust and smoke.
Weiwei has used toy bricks made in China (manufactured by Woma) to create an interplay between childhood innocence and the destruction of modern warfare.
Do I like the world that we live in today? I love the world. I always love even what can be the most tragic time. I still love the world because different conditions give unknown coincidence, and still give us opportunity to understand others and understand ourselves in different ways.
Source: Museums Journal
Watch a timelapse of History of Bombs being built in the Factory International Warehouse
Law of the Journey
PVC, Metal2017, 2025
Law of the Journey features a 60-metre-long boat crowded with 258 anonymous refugee figures suspended in space.
The inflatable boat and figures are made from black rubber and fabricated in a Chinese factory that also manufactures the precarious vessels used by thousands of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
It [Law of the Journey] was relevant 4,000 years ago, it is relevant now and it will be relevant in the future. I think with today's extreme power and financial divisiveness – the real money only reaches the very few – with huge property ownership created, plus with AI craziness, a lot of people will lose their old social structure. So, how will they struggle through life? There will be huge casualties, and we don't even have to go to another land to become a refugee. We can be a refugee in our own home.
Ai Weiwei pays a powerful tribute to the human tragedy of the present moment as well as to humankind’s eternal desire for home and a sense of a belonging. It’s a poignant piece of work that brings the monumental scale of the global humanitarian migration crisis sharply into focus.
There’s no refugee crisis, but only human crisis. In dealing with refugees we’ve lost our very basic values. In this time of uncertainty, we need more tolerance, compassion and trust for each other since we all are one. Otherwise, humanity will face an even bigger crisis.
Ai Weiwei carrying one of the refugees during the install
Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads
Bronze2010
The Zodiac Project is Ai Weiwei's first major public sculpture. He has recreated the famous twelve bronze animal heads that once adorned the Zodiac Fountain in Yuan Ming Yuan, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
Cast around 1750, the original heads were stolen by Anglo-French troops who took part in the destruction of Yuan Ming Yuan in 1860 during the Second Opium War.
Rat
302.3 x 127.2 x 157.5 cm
Pig
302 x 135 x 170 cm
Dog
366 x 135 x 173 cm
Rooster
366 x 135 x 140 cm
Monkey
302.3 x 135 x 142 cm
Ram
305 x 153.5 x 157.5 cm
Horse
325 x 157.5 x 160 cm
Snake
300 x 135 x 160 cm
Dragon
340 x 168 x 195.6 cm
Rabbit
28 x 135 x 160 cm
Tiger
328 x 135 x 157.5 cm
Ox
302.3 x 135 x 155 cm
It was designed by an Italian and made by a Frenchman for a Qing dynasty emperor, which actually is somebody who invaded China. So if we talk about 'national treasure,' which nation do we talk about?
Install material from Ai Weiwei Instagram – setting up the heads
La Commedia Umana
Murano glass, metal2017, 2021
La Commedia Umana is a black Murano glass chandelier made up of over 2000 pieces and weighing nearly 3 tonnes.
The work “attempt[s] to talk about death in order to celebrate life,” Ai Weiwei has observed. It is also an artwork that has continued to grow and evolve through the connotations of its morbid framework of body parts.
At first, it became a metaphor for the pandemic itself; a vivid physical representation of the loss endured by so many over these last few years.
Now, in light of a new war, La Commedia Umana garners more disturbing connotations, a totem to loss of all kinds, a monument to the dead that emerge from all kinds of conflict; not just those who die from a virus, but those who die at the hands of other humans.
Glass, a special material and a part of our daily life, bears witness to joy, anxiety and worry in our reality. In its presence we reflect upon the relationships between life and death, and between tradition and reality.
Watch how La Commedia Ummana was built in the Factory International Warehouse
Surfing / Surfing (After Hokusai)
Toy Bricks
Ai Weiwei's Surfing (2023) is a toy brick mosaic reinterpretation of Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The turbulent, monumental wave, an iconic symbol of nature's power and the fragility of human endeavour features small migrant rubber dinghies on the crest.
The entire installation is built using millions of interlocking plastic toy bricks, similarly to Surfing / Surfing (After Hokusai). The work explores global displacement and political conflict, as well as the modern humanitarian crisis through the use of everyday consumer plastic toys.
Painting can be very flat. You see what you see, right? And with LEGOs, it is not what you see. Your eyes are always shifting and changing. So that makes the game more interesting—of looking, you know, at least a way of looking.
Source: Observer
Installing Surfing (After Hokusai)
You obviously want the viewer to participate in the act of seeing, and they can do this by trying to understand how the work is made. Everybody has some toy-building and digital gaming experience, so that attempt to understand becomes interesting when looking at the work. But it's not just about construction; it's about deconstruction at the same time—and that is quite interesting.
Source: Observer
Nian Nian / Commemoration
Audio installation2021
On 24th April 2010 at 00:51, Ai Weiwei began a Twitter campaign to commemorate the 5205 students who died in the Sichuan earthquake on 12th May 2008.
3444 volunteers delivered voice recordings of the names of the students who died in the earthquake, and their names were recited 12,140 times.
Nian Nian in Chinese means always remember, never forget.
This powerful, relentless audio artwork highlights the tragic passing of innocent lives, as well as indignation for the cover-ups on truths about sub-standard architecture, which led to the large number of schools collapsing during the earthquake.
Eight-Nation Alliance Flags
Lorem ipsum2015
These are the flags of the Eight-Nation alliance: Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the US, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Long-lost nations that invaded China in 1900 in a bid to reopen its ports.
All eight large-scale flags have been carefully sewn together using four million buttons, which the artist bought from a bankrupt factory in Croydon when it closed down in 2019.
Weiwei has woven together narratives of industrialisation, colonialism and historic violence into a complex image of modern history. He explores the rise and fall of empires, and attempts to calculate the cost. The flags look and feel heavy; weighed down by history and its continuing impact.
The work is the most peaceful, darling work. Look at it – every single ivory button is sewn on by the hands of these Chinese ladies from a not-so-developed area in China. Only Chinese people can make work like this. Just look at it. Each flag contains thousands of buttons, I think 400,000 buttons in total across the eight flags. It's a work about love and about memory.
Source: Museums Journal
The Journey of the Buttons
Ai mysteriously bought a 30-ton hoard of buttons in 2019 after making a bid on Twitter to claim boxes of unsold stock from the London company, A. Brown and Co, Buttons, which was closing down after 104 years. Otherwise destined for landfill, the trove included unique pieces made from plastic, metal, glass, pearl and olive wood.
The artist had the whole cache secretly shipped to China, his homeland, where his team of artisans created the eight flags that would become Eight-Nation Alliance Flag.
According to Factory International’s Creative Director Low Kee Hong, the buttons also have a personal resonance for Ai. When he was growing up, these objects were very precious and the artist remembers his brother’s friends offering him a collection of buttons as a parting gift when leaving for university. The items are “part of a personal journey,” for the artist, Kee Hong told The Times.
How did a tweet, Manchester's industrial history and 30,000 tonnes lead to Ai Weiwei creating a new series of artworks? Source: Factory International
Wang Family Ancestral Hall
Wood, stone2015
The Wang Family Ancestral Hall is a real-life Ming dynasty ancestral temple that was found collapsing to ruin in the Jiangxi countryside. It’s been reconstructed from 1500 wooden pieces.
As Ai Weiwei has stated, one of the central themes of his work consists of the relationships between “the old and the new” and “the true and the false,” which are part of an investigation into the aesthetic values that define our view of artworks and cultural objects.
We have to bear our memory. Even if it is a nightmare, it should belong to us
Source: Museums Journal
History of Bombs
Toy Bricks2019, 2025
The toy-brick version of The History of Bombs mural measures 25m wide and 10m high and has been hand-built by volunteers from Greater Manchester and Ai Weiwei's studio.
Constructed from over 3.5 million toy bricks, it’s the largest toy-brick mosaic in the world. The mural features life-size, pixelated 2D depictions of 50 of the most powerful and destructive weapons known to humankind, from historical conventional weapons to weapons of mass destruction.
History of Bombs is about the essential facts of our modern history. The work focuses on our human capacity for destruction; how we attempt to solve political, religious, and economic crises through the use of explosives, which is against any humanity and rationality. Today, we have many more bombs with unthinkably destructive power, capable of reducing civilization to dust and smoke.
Weiwei has used toy bricks made in China (manufactured by Woma) to create an interplay between childhood innocence and the destruction of modern warfare.
Do I like the world that we live in today? I love the world. I always love even what can be the most tragic time. I still love the world because different conditions give unknown coincidence, and still give us opportunity to understand others and understand ourselves in different ways.
Source: Museums Journal
Watch a timelapse of History of Bombs being built in the Factory International Warehouse