If you were asked off the top of your head to name a contemporary Chinese artist, the answer would probably be Ai Weiwei. In September 2026, we have a chance to deepen our knowledge of his work thanks to Patrick Derom Gallery, where a major retrospective of this legendary artist opens on 19 September. The location is ideal – Petit Sablon – and the exhibition extends across two venues, the second being The Art of Defiance. Those who managed to buy tickets in advance will also have the opportunity to see and hear Ai Weiwei himself at his art talk at Bozar on 30 September, which is currently sold out.

Edouard Derom, son of the gallery’s founder, took us through the exhibition rooms of this gallery, with its 40-year history, speaking with great passion about the Chinese artist whose exhibition he has been preparing for several years, while maintaining continuous contact with this famously strong-willed and rebellious artist. I have to say that Edouard’s own track record as an art historian impressed me no less than Ai Weiwei’s biography: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His academic specialisation is European post-war avant-garde and the ZERO movement.

So, at Patrick Derom Gallery, around 50 significant works by Ai Weiwei from the 1990s trace the development of the artistic practice of this dissident artist. Among them are the renowned photographic series Study of Perspective and the famous Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo. There is certainly plenty to see.

The visual centrepiece of the exhibition is a recent work by Ai Weiwei: a sunflower laid out from camouflage jackets embroidered with buttons, with every element carrying symbolic meaning. In Chinese propaganda, Mao Zedong – (the artist’s father Ai Qing was persecuted during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, forcing the family to live in a dugout on the edge of the desert) – was depicted as the sun, while the Chinese people were portrayed as sunflowers turning towards him. Ai Weiwei takes this familiar political image and translates it into a completely different visual language. Here, he uses the sunflower as one of the symbols of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, transforming the solar circle into an anti-war statement.

Beside this work, which despite its powerful political dimension is simply beautiful to look at – its author is, above all, an artist – you will see a fragment of Ai Weiwei’s most famous project, Sunflower Seeds, created in 2010 for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. Around 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds were scattered across the vast hall, each one individually made and hand-painted by 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen, the Chinese city historically renowned for its porcelain production. The entire installation weighed around 150 tonnes and covered approximately 1,000 square metres. Visitors were initially allowed to walk across the “field of seeds”, but this was soon prohibited because of potentially harmful porcelain dust.

One tiny seed is almost invisible. One hundred million become an immense field. The work reflects on how an individual exists within society, and how millions of individuals can become a collective force. Ai Weiwei raises, in visual form, the question of the relationship between the individual and the mass – a particularly relevant issue in a country of more than a billion people.

The installation also contains an element of irony: a work that appears to be the product of mass production was, in fact, made entirely by hand by thousands of people. Porcelain is both one of the symbols of Chinese culture and one of China’s most important exports. The work therefore also invites us to think about contemporary Chinese manufacturing, global trade and the idea of “Made in China”.

I mentioned the buttons because they have a particular significance in Ai Weiwei’s work, with a history rooted in his childhood. The artist recalls the extreme material hardship in which he grew up: he had one pair of trousers and one pair of shoes, so losing a button could become a real problem. Later, during his secret detention in Beijing in 2011, he was kept under constant surveillance by two soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army of China. He was forbidden to look them in the face, so his eyes would inevitably settle on the buttons of their uniforms. This experience turned the button into a deeply personal image of power, control and uniformity.

In 2019, Ai Weiwei learned that the British factory Brown & Co Buttons in Croydon, which was closing down, was planning to dispose of a huge stock of buttons. He acquired around 30 tonnes – approximately four million buttons. It later emerged that the collection contained around 9,000 different varieties, made from plastic, metal, wood, bone, mother-of-pearl and other materials.

This material gave rise to one of his major new works, Eight-Nation Alliance Flags. Millions of buttons were sewn by hand onto fabric and transformed into eight enormous flags representing the states that formed the Eight-Nation Alliance, which intervened in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. It is a very characteristic Ai Weiwei gesture: a small, everyday object becomes the starting point for a vast story about colonialism, industry, war and political power.

In the room devoted to the Study of Perspective photographic series, you will also find another of the artist’s favourite non-verbal signs, rendered here in embroidery made from buttons. Ai Weiwei began the series in 1995. In each photograph, he extends his arm in front of a building or another symbol of power and raises his middle finger. Among the best-known images are Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the White House in Washington, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, along with many other iconic locations.

The gesture is deliberately crude and extremely simple. Ai Weiwei uses the language of the street to say: “I do not automatically recognise this authority. I have the right to my own opinion.” And he does not direct the gesture exclusively at political buildings. The subject can be any symbol of authority, the state, an institution or social order.

The title Study of Perspective is important too. “Perspective” refers literally to the photographic viewpoint, but at the same time to the artist’s personal position. What is considered great, untouchable and authoritative, Ai Weiwei invites us to see from his own perspective.

To show the scale of Ai Weiwei’s larger works, Edouard Derom rented a space called The Art of Defiance, literally just around the corner from his gallery. Here we see the artist’s well-known photograph Illumination, recreated in LEGO — a technique that is important to him and widely represented throughout the exhibition.

Behind this image lies a very specific episode in his life, connected with the Sichuan earthquake, police violence and freedom of speech. On 12 August 2009, Ai Weiwei travelled to Chengdu to appear as a defence witness at the trial of writer and activist Tan Zuoren. Tan Zuoren had investigated the deaths of schoolchildren during the Sichuan earthquake of 12 May 2008 and was interested in why so many schools had collapsed. Ai Weiwei himself had conducted an independent investigation and, together with volunteers, collected the names of the children who had died.

That night, police broke into the hotel room where Ai Weiwei was staying and beat him. The following morning, as the police were escorting him out of the hotel, he noticed the mirrored walls of the lift and managed to take a photograph of himself with his phone. The image shows Ai Weiwei, two police officers and his friend, musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou.

The photograph quickly became a symbol of his civic stance. The flash from the phone resembles a halo, a symbolic circle of light above the head of a man confronted by state power.

The memory of the schoolchildren who died in the earthquake is also at the heart of another monumental work: a giant snake made from school backpacks.

In LEGO, we also see Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), one of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic and widely reproduced works, consisting of three photographs. In the first, the artist holds an ancient ceramic urn from the Han dynasty, around two thousand years old. In the second, he lets it slip from his hands. In the third, he watches as it smashes onto the ground.

Here we have a real historical object destroyed for the sake of an artistic gesture. For Ai Weiwei, the act raises questions about the value of cultural heritage: why is an ancient object automatically considered precious, and who decides what makes it valuable in the first place? The destruction of the urn becomes a reflection on power, history and the possibility of rewriting the past.

There is also a personal element of risk: the artist destroys something that can never be restored. At the same time, the photograph preserves the very moment of destruction. What has disappeared physically continues to exist as an image and as a work of art. Ai Weiwei seems to transform a single act of destruction into a new historical document.

The photographs were taken by the artist’s brother.

An absolute revelation for me was Ai Weiwei’s historical cultural connection with Belgium. Alongside the Brussels exhibition, the Musée Émile Verhaeren is presenting an exhibition devoted to this remarkable intellectual and spiritual connection. It takes place in Sint-Amands, the town on the Scheldt where the poet, who was also admired by the Russian Symbolists, was born, roughly halfway between Antwerp and Dendermonde.

The connection between Ai Weiwei and Émile Verhaeren begins with Ai Qing, the Chinese poet and Ai Weiwei’s father. As a young man, Ai Qing lived in Paris in the 1920s, where he discovered European literature and encountered the poetry of Émile Verhaeren. He was so impressed by it that he later translated Verhaeren’s work into Chinese, introducing the Belgian poet to Chinese readers.

Ai Qing was drawn to Verhaeren’s themes of the individual, society, labour, the city, social change and freedom – questions that were also central to his own work. Ai Qing was later subjected to political persecution and exile, and his experience had a profound influence on Ai Weiwei’s worldview.

Today, this story continues at the Musée Émile Verhaeren. For the exhibition Life, Revolt, Poetry, Ai Weiwei selected works connected with his father’s legacy. Among the exhibits are Chinese translations of Verhaeren made by Ai Qing, including Les Plaines and La Ville from 1948, as well as a portrait of Émile Verhaeren created by Ai Weiwei in 2026 using LEGO.

And so an extraordinary cultural bridge emerges: Émile Verhaeren – Ai Qing – Ai Weiwei, three generations of artistic dialogue.

There is something particularly careful, intimate and moving in the artist’s approach to an exhibition devoted to his father. This is hardly surprising: the poet was the most powerful role model in his son’s life.