Ai Weiwei Stages a Provocative Warp/Weft Conversation With Rubelli at Milan Design Week
“Ai Weiwei: About Silk” is a site-specific installation about freedom and the materials of empire
On a red background, the stylized curve of a disjointed arm appears brocaded in gold, and the repetition is reminiscent of stylized bird prints. But it doesn’t really take a second glance to recognize that the hands at the ends of those arms are themselves “flipping the bird.” It’s just one visual comment in artist Ai Weiwei’s collaboration with the Venetian fabric house Rubelli at Milan Design Week 2026. Founded in 1889, Rubelli is, as Ai puts it, on a short list of textile creators up to the task of realizing the vision seen here: “In today’s world, very few companies can still hold such a high quality and has a respect to the tradition.” The collaboration is called “Ai Weiwei: About Silk,” and it’s a site-specific installation at the brand’s showroom on via Fatebenefratelli.
Elsewhere, the imagery includes a fantastical tangle of tangle of chains, technological references such as surveillance cameras, and yet another bird who can only be a sly mirror of the erstwhile mascot for The Social Media Platform Formerly known as Twitter.
The historic European and Asian relationships to the sumptuous material haunt the background: the silk road that led to the rich Renaissance merchant houses bounded back in the desire of colonial powers to exploit Asia, after all, and return in modern fears that TikTok is coming to destroy liberal democracy. The echoes of the Silk Road form a web here of tangled conspiracy and otherness in the mind as dense as a silkworm’s wound cocoon. The gold on red is somewhere between Vatican City and the Forbidden City, two ancient and deeply ritualized repositories of arcane, artistic, and historical treasures.
Rubelli brings its 130 years of luxury experience to the textiles as if it were furnishing a palace, even though “About Silk” is more for seeing than sitting. Nearly 10,000 gold and dramatically deep red warp threads cross five different kinds of weft to create the arrestingly plush yet societally pertinent images.
Free speech themes are also present in the deliberate references to one of Ai’s most famous work, The Animal that Looks like a Llama but is Actually an Alpaca. That project referred to a popular meme-based form of online web resistance to censorship known as the “Grass Mud Horse.” It centers around the Chinese word for alpaca, which, when mispronounced, sounds like a common obscenity. In nearly all cultures, the worst insults are the ones that cast aspersions on the behavior and integrity of the target’s mother, or mess with gender roles. So it is with some of the subversions springing from the Alpaca/Llama, which Ai also reflected on in his Grass Mud Horse lithograph series. In serious times, Ai Weiwei is seriously playful.
“Ai Weiwei: About Silk” will be on view at Rubelli Showroom at Via Fatebenefratelli, 9 – Milan until May 15, 2026.