Ying Miao

Miao Ying 苗颖 (born 1985) is an internet artist and writer, best known for her projects around the Chinese internet and online culture inside the Great Firewall.  Her work highlights the attempts to discuss mainstream technology and contemporary consciousness and it’s impact on our daily lives, along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and consciousness created during the representation of reality through technology.

Miao Ying graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree from the China Academy of Art's New Media Art department in Hangzhou, China, and earned an Master in Fine Arts degree in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred State College's School of Art and Design in 2009.

Miao Ying is the first generation of Chinese Internet Artists. The New Media Art department at CAA covers a wide range of disciplines from photography and video to animation and programming, It was the first new media art program in China where Miao Ying studied with Chinese avant-garde pioneers, Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi.

Miao Ying 's initial work focused on censorship on the Chinese internet through projects like The Blind Spot (2007), where the artist created a dictionary out of the words censored from google.cn.[1] She continues to create work primarily online, often using GIFs, mixing screenshots and lo-fi visual elements, Second Life, and drawing from the visual style of major Chinese websites like Taobao and Baidu. Her work allows users outside China to get a glimpse of life within the Great Firewall and explores in a humorous way, the visual language born from the internet and its effect on users as they interact with it. She also works with Bilibili, a video-sharing website where user's comments appear over the video in real time, as in her web-based work iPhone Garbage (2014)[2]. This technique of information overload is also a source of inspiration for Miao’s practice; she uses the term naodong, internet slang literally meaning “brain hole,” derived from naobu, or “brain supplement.” On July 8-August 7, 2015, she exhibited a series of GIFs of websites blocked in China titled "HOLDING A KITCHEN KNIFE TO CUT THE INTERNET CABLE" at the Chinese Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

• “.com/.cn", co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and MoMA PS1, 2017
• “After Us”, co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and New Museum, 2017
• “The New Normal—Art and China in 2017”, Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, 2017
• "Miao Ying: Chinternet Plus" New Museum, First Look Online, New York, 2016
• “Secret Surface”, KW institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2016
• "Content Aware", Madein Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2016
• "Chinternet How: a love story”, Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, 2016.
• "HOLDING A KITCHEN KNIFE TO CUT THE INTERNET CABLE" Exhibition for the Chinese Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2015
• "The Ballad of Generation Y" OCAT, Shanghai, China, 2016.
• ".gif ISLAND" V Art Center, Shanghai, China 2014.