Ai Weiwei's 'Gangnam Style' Parody Banned

The Chinese government bans Ai's parody video of 'Gangnam Style.'

Published

8 months ago

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Transcript

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei is criticizing the Chinese government for removing his take on Korean pop sensation Psy's Gangnam Style video from Chinese websites. The video shows Ai and staff from his company performing Psy's infamous horse dance in his Beijing studio. Ai has named the video Grass Mud Horse, a species of alpaca, which in Mandarin is phonetically very similar to a strong curse word. The profanity-sounding name has become a symbol of the online community's defiance of Internet censors which remove profanity and other content considered sensitive. SOUNDBITE: Ai Weiwei, artist, saying (English): "We only filmed for a bit over ten minutes, but we used a whole day to edit, and eventually put it online at midnight. After we had uploaded it, a few hours later, a few hours after we had started work, we found that a lot of people, tens of thousands, had already watched it. Now in China it has already been totally removed, deleted entirely, and you can't see it in China." The 55-year-old is an internationally renowned artist and China's most high-profile dissident, regularly clashing with the country's communist authorities.