Two emotionless prison guards watch Ai Weiwei as he eats, sleeps, paces, showers - and even sits on the toilet - in the Chinese artist's new obscenity-filled, metaphor-rich music video mocking state power.
The video accompanying the visual artist's single "Dumbass" - released Wednesday but blocked online in mainland China - is meant to reconstruct his 81-day detention in 2011, which was part of an overall crackdown on dissent. Ai's subsequent conviction for tax evasion has been seen as punishment for his activism.
Ai said he had created the five-minute video, which is peppered with bad language and also shows guards dancing with lingerie-clad women as well as a toilet full of crabs, to highlight the plight of other Chinese dissidents.
It culminates with him wearing women's underwear himself, his head shaved and his mouth in a lipsticked pout.
The video was shot by famed Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, best-known for working with high-profile Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai.
The combination of music and police repression was inspired by his own 81-day detention in 2011, Ai told AFP, adding that for the video he created an "exact model" of the room in which he was kept for much of the period.
"People who are detained suffer traumas, and those who detain us know this very well," Ai said at a video premiere ceremony in Beijing. "This is why we are secretly detained, blindfolded, cuffed, and not allowed to meet with lawyers and relatives."
"There are so many political prisoners in China who are being kept in even worse conditions than I was," he said. "When I was detained, the guards would ask me to sing songs for them... even in such a place people still have imagination."
"I had been thinking about how to recover from the trauma. And I came up with the idea of using music to convey a sentiment that is tremendously secret, and private, to the public," Ai said.
After his release, Ai's design firm was slapped with a $2.4 million tax bill, which he fought unsuccessfully in the Chinese courts.
Ai has irked Beijing by using his art and online profile to draw attention to injustices in China and the need for greater transparency and rule of law.
His music video, screeching with heavily distorted guitars, depicts an insensitive, overbearing state power that tramples on individual rights. The Chinese-language lyrics are full of obscene insults, and the video images include animals that have become euphemisms for defiantly circumventing strict censorship.
Some of the track's few printable lyrics include: "Tolerance be damned, to hell with manners, the low-life's invincible" and "Stand on the frontline like a dumbass, in a country that puts out like a hooker."
"This video was not shot for me, and this song, I am not singing for myself," Ai said. "This is dedicated to all those people who do not have the opportunity to raise their voice, who will never be able to raise their voices. This is not just one generation. In the past 60 years there have been innumerable amounts of people who have been killed or sent away from their homes, even tortured to death."
However, web surfers in China are unlikely to see it.
During the premiere, Ai and his assistants posted links to the video on social media and file-sharing sites that are blocked in China, including Twitter and YouTube. They also tried - in front of reporters - to post to Chinese sites including tudou.com, but those attempts were not successful, apparently because censors, who review the content before it becomes public, rejected the video.
The music video has Ai himself singing the song's explicit lyrics.
"Dumbass" is the first single from Ai's forthcoming music album "The Divine Comedy."
Later this year, Ai is due to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, one of the biggest events in the global art calendar, but he said he is not able to travel outside China because authorities have seized his passport.
"I still haven't been given back my passport, and the authorities have never explained why... I am not sure if I will be able to go," he said.
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