Ai Weiwei, Gangnam Style and Lao expression.

Ai Weiwei was recently quoted regarding his send-up of Gangnam Style: “We feel that every person has the right to express themselves, and this right to expression is fundamentally linked to our happiness, and even our existence. When a society constantly demands that everyone should abandon that right, then the society becomes a society without creativity. It can never become a happy society.”

It's good advice anywhere, but I really hope Lao artists everywhere would take those principles to heart, and push our art to the next level. As the Daily Beast article pointed out: 

"The value that Ai holds most dear, in his art and his life, is freedom—freedom to think and talk as he pleases and to make the art that he wants. His new video shows another kind of freedom he’s insisting on: the freedom to do whatever silly, useless, harmless thing he desires. It’s the freedom to thumb his nose not just at the Chinese authorities—although they’ve clearly been feeling nose-thumbed, shutting down access to Ai’s video on the country’s websites—but at everyone and everything that settles for conformity (of which there is more in China than in some other countries)."

At the moment, the most popular of Lao responses has been a simple imitation of form,and not the formulation of a new statement, especially one that challenges the many issues Lao and others should be asking regarding the limits of our international expression.

But on a lighter note my favorite parody of "Gangnam Stlye" besides Ai Weiwei's take and the mom dancing with her son is John Carpenter's parody drawing on the nemesis of Big Trouble in Little China, David Lo Pan. But your mileage may vary: