About Silk: Ai Weiwei x Rubelli
For a material so intimately bound to the histories of power, trade, and empire, silk has always been more than fabric. It has been currency, diplomacy, and desire, a fibre that connected China to Venice along routes whose significance was never purely commercial. It is this layered inheritance that Ai Weiwei draws upon in About Silk, a site-specific installation created with Venetian textile house Rubelli, currently on view at their Milan showroom through May.
The centrepiece is a silk lampas — a richly patterned, multi-layered woven fabric — of exceptional technical ambition. Rubelli's weavers at their Como mill built the cloth on a warp of 9,600 threads in deep red and golden yellow, interlacing five distinct wefts at 130 picks per centimetre to achieve something close to photographic clarity in silk.
Three calibrated shades of gold build sculptural relief across the surface, while a cold grey yarn simulates the reflective lens of a surveillance camera with quiet precision. The resulting textile is at once sumptuous and unsettling: a brocaded language in which handcuffs acquire soft dimensionality, and the cheerful outline of a llama — a symbol of anti-censorship dissent in China — sits amongst chains and Twitter birds, rendered in the full lustrous vocabulary of Venetian luxury weaving.
The design is taken from Ai Weiwei's original artwork The Animal that Looks like a Llama but is Actually an Alpaca, and its journey into cloth was painstaking. Every element of the image had to be re-engineered for the loom, from structure and colour to weave sequence. Crucially, this was no digital shortcut: the imagery was realised through the full, demanding discipline of lampas weaving. That choice matters. To embed a politically charged artwork into silk (a fibre that originated in China, was coveted by Venice, and whose secrets once travelled the ancient trade routes between them) is to load the cloth with centuries of meaning. The collaboration asks a subtle but urgent question: what happens when protest meets one of history's most symbolically freighted materials?
Two display cases designed by Formafantasma ground the installation in material history. The first holds Venetian silks spanning the 15th to 18th centuries — a ferronnerie velvet chalice veil, fragments of damask and ciselé velvet, a linen and silk brocatelle — each a record of the Serenissima's cosmopolitan reach. The second traces the westward drift of Eastern decorative language: chinoiserie lampas in peach-pink tones, embroidered Qing-era satins, the dragon and phoenix quietly absorbed into Rococo caprice. Together they make a compelling curatorial argument: that silk has always carried the politics of those who produced and consumed it.
Completing the installation is a double-faced silk and linen fabric bearing Ai Weiwei's Finger motif — a raised middle finger that reverses in colour from one face to the other. First conceived as part of his photographic series Study of Perspective in 1995, the gesture here finds a new and knowing home in cloth. That it should be woven in silk, the very fibre that originated in China and made Venice rich, gives it a particular charge. The material itself becomes the message.
...
Further information:
Ai Weiwei: About Silk is on view at Rubelli, Via Fatebenefratelli 9, Milan, until 15 May 2026.
...
Image Credits:
All images: Rubelli x Ai Weiwei, About Silk. Photography: @claudiazalla