Funnier if you speak Chinese

Spurred by the detention of the artist and government critic Ai Weiwei in April of 2011, Pi San created this satirical animation as a tribute to Ai and, more broadly, as an indictment of the corrosive effects of censorship on society and on language itself. A masterpiece of comic subterfuge, the animation refers to Ai not by name but mainly through the subject of one of his most famous solo exhibitions: the one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds he laid out across the floor of the Tate Modern in 2010. (The Chinese character for Kuang Kuang’s exasperated sigh, “ai,” 哎, also happens to be just a few brush strokes away from Ai’s surname: 艾.)