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Last Updated | Thursday, 12:54 p.m. As my colleagues Jeff DelViscio and Shreeya Sinha reported last month, “Gangnam Style,” a music video by a South Korean rapper known as PSY with more than 530 million views on YouTube, has been “remixed and redone by motivated fans” around the globe. On Wednesday, Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident and artist, joined in, uploading his own cover version of the rap video to YouTube.

The artist, who mimics the mock horse-riding dance moves of the original while wearing handcuffs in his remix, calls his version “Grass-Mud Horse Style,” a reference to a Chinese Internet meme that employs a pun on an obscene phrase to mock government censorship of the Web.

As my colleague Michael Wines wrote in a thorough explication of the meme in 2009, the grass-mud horse is “a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity.” Chinese bloggers invented the alpaca-like creature to demonstrate the absurdity of censorship by embedding foul language in an innocent-looking video for a children’s song about its adventures. That same year, Mr. Ai took part in the anti-censorship protest by posting a self-portrait on his blog in which he was naked, with a stuffed animal described as a grass-mud horse covering his genitals.

YouTube is blocked in China, but the remix was also uploaded to Chinese video-sharing sites like Tudou, where the artist told Reuters “a lot of people, tens of thousands,” viewed it before it was removed by censors. “Now, in China, it has already been totally removed, deleted entirely, and you can’t see it in China,” Mr Ai said on Thursday. “We only filmed for a bit over 10 minutes, but we used a whole day to edit,” he added.

Angus Walker, a correspondent in China for Britain’s ITV, reported on Thursday that Mr. Ai said, of the most prominent prop in his video, “handcuffs have recently become very familiar, almost daily objects; they should belong to law enforcement but in many many cases in China people are arrested or taken away without any formal charge.”

Mr. Ai explained to The Associated Press on Thursday that he made the video after hearing that the family home of his friend Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a Chinese rock musician, was being demolished. “Our happiness is constantly being taken away from us, our homes demolished, we are always controlled, passports can be taken away from us, and all these can affect our happiness,” the artist said. “However, every morning we have the opportunity to give others something to laugh about. Laughter is important.”

In a video interview with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker recorded in the artist’s Beijing studio on Oct. 9, Mr. Ai explained what it is about communicating via the Internet that he finds “so beautiful.”