Ai Weiwei is coming to Milan Design Week 2026: here’s the project

Here on the pages of Domus we have already told you about some of the major must-see of Fuorisalone 2026: from the courtyard of Palazzo Pitta to the cloister of the Pinacoteca di Brera, this year once again the setups of the city’s most significant event seem ready to turn Milan into a widespread treasure hunt. Now, almost unexpectedly, the historic Venetian company Rubelli joins the program, opening its Milan showroom to a site-specific project by Ai Weiwei, conceived to connect artistic practice and textile knowledge. About Silk, on view from April 17 to May 15, thus becomes part of the Fuorisalone program with an immersive intervention in which the artist entrusts “his message to silk, the original material of China.”

Installed in the spaces on Via Fatebenefratelli, the installation envelops the visitor in a silk lampas, one of the most complex textile techniques of the Venetian tradition, developed from The Animal that Looks like a Llama but is Actually an Alpaca, one of the artist’s most well-known patterns. The fabric, produced by Rubelli with silk yarns and metallic inserts, translates into weave the iconographic repertoire of Ai Weiwei’s research — surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains, the Twitter logo — transforming it into three-dimensional ornamental elements with an inherent critical charge. 

At the center of the room stands a geometric sofa designed by the artist. The installation then continues with a second textile, Finger, a double-faced silk and linen fabric featuring the famous middle-finger gesture, which serves as the backdrop for two display cases designed by Formafantasma. Both contain artifacts from the Rubelli Historical Archive and Foundation, weaving a link between memory and tradition: original Chinese documents, eighteenth-century chinoiserie, and fragments of Venetian silk dating from the late fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, highlighting the influence of Eastern aesthetics on Western taste in a period when Venetian production dominated international markets.

The work created for Rubelli is a new piece that fits coherently into Ai Weiwei’s trajectory, a central figure in international contemporary art, whose practice has often focused on the relationships between the individual, power, freedom, and systems of control, starting from direct biographical experiences. In About Silk, his socio-political commitment is translated for the first time into the domain of textiles, through a refined and complex production technique. Silk, a material deeply rooted in Chinese culture and at the same time in the Venetian manufacturing tradition, is thus activated as a political surface in a warp that absorbs and revives symbols of control and dissent, transforming ornament into narrative.

Completing the experience is a new documentary film by Argentine director Felipe Sanguinetti, shot between Downing College in Cambridge and Rubelli’s weaving mill in Como, which follows the creative process and the artist’s reflections on the relationship between material and political message, offering further keys to interpreting the project.