About a month ago I posted an interview with the American, yet Shanghai-based, graffiti artist Mels from Beast Mode Crew. Mels gave an excellent overview of the contemporary Chinese graffiti scene and the way it’s growing in the grey zones of China’s municipal consciousness. China might have some of the world’s biggest cities, but these cities are all pretty much in flux, and the laws that state what you can do with them are not always clear or policed.

I thought it would be good to follow this up with a feature on a local artist, and even better one who is from the city of Wuhan – one of the Chinese cities best known for street and general counter-cultural activity, from hip hop to art to rock. Ray was one of the first to start spray-painting the Wuhan streets in the early to mid-2000s, and speaks confidently about why he hasn’t moved to Beijing or Shanghai yet.

Ray’s work is like rock and roll sherbet for the eyes, dazzling with bright colours and industrial graphics. Check out the pictures below, or Ray’s blog for stacks more examples. Of course it would be best to see these pieces in situ, jazzing up a wall with the high gloss appearance of 3D animation. My guess is they would light up a back alley, both gritty and slick all at once.

I was late to learning about Gangnam Style. One night I was at a café and was socially garish enough to ask my companions what it was. ‘You don’t know about Gangnam style?,’ they gasped, half impressed, half horrified. ‘She doesn’t know about Gangnam style. Everybody knows about Gangnam style …’ I went home with the sticky sounding words in my head, trying to figure out how to pronounce them.

Of course, from that point on I started to see it everywhere. It kept popping up online, it was playing in the background in taxis. Even my four year old knew about it from kindergarten, and gave her own rendition of the South Korean rap with her own wonky dancing. I soon realised that more than the song itself, the point of the craze was its use for parody – originally of Seoul’s wannabe fashionistas, and later of all kinds of people and social phenomena. At this point, there are literally hundreds of adaptations of the dance uploaded to Youtube, each one a spin off from the original with its nonsensical horse-riding dance moves.

I suppose it’s because of the jig’s horsey characteristics that Ai Weiwei has now picked it up and turned it to his own light-hearted music video critique. Ai’s clip is a clear reference to the Grass Mud Horse – China’s own popular and virally transmitted parody – and so is also an oblique reference to China’s Internet censorship. (Grass Mud Horse sounds like F*** Your Mother, but is written differently, and now references a whole lexicon of other such homonyms that allow people to skirt censorship online).