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Meet Miao Ying, the Young Internet Artist Breaking Through China's Firewall

" Recently, at Art Basel Hong Kong, and exhibitions coinciding with the fair, in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing, one couldn’t avoid the work of Miao Ying, the young Chinese artist whose official bio states that she “resides on the Internet.” At “.com/.cn,” a show curated by MoMA PS1’s Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey at K11’s pop-up space in Hong Kong, visitors could sit inside her installation landscape.gif, surrounded by multiple iPads playing amateur-style GIFs. Her work popped up again in Shanghai, at another K11 show curated by the New Museum's Lauren Cornell, “After Us,” and in Beijing at UCCA’s “The New Normal.” At the Art Basel fair, Modern Media, China’s mightiest luxury publishing platform, her APP-Nosis series, a sendup of touch-screen branding, decorated the booth to promote a new art-guide app; not far away, her work was being shown by Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder of Vienna. And, of course, anyone could pull up her 2016 digital exhibition with the New Museum, “Chinternet Plus,” on their phone. Meanwhile, soon she will be in Rhizome’s Seven on Seven panels alongside artists such as DIS, Bunny Rogers, and Jayson Musson. The perk of being an artist who lives on the internet is that you can be literally everywhere."

RHIZOME: Artist Profile: Miao Ying

"Censorship is like a nasty boyfriend/girlfriend you cannot tame. It's even worse than that; it's actually more like developing Stockholm syndrome—a traumatic bonding. This kind of love takes place in an isolated environment where the hostage-taker—who makes the rules—becomes so powerful that you gradually fall in love with them."

Chaos & Control, How postinternet aesthetics are thriving behind the Great Firewall

" In Miao’s Chinternet Plus (2016), co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum as part of its ‘First Look’ online exhibition series in June, the artist lampoons ‘Internet Plus’, the Chinese government’s strategy for the transformation of major industries through big data and artificial intelligence. For Miao, the Party’s spirit of technological gung-ho is a hollow exercise in political branding. However, unlike Silicon Valley’s political lobbies, China’s internet corporations maintain their monopolies through a collaborative rather than a coercive relationship with the government. Content on the Chinternet proliferates because, rather than in spite, of its state-backed digital ecology. As such, the prospects for the implementation of big data techniques at an unprecedented scale are formidable."

MIAO YING AND THE FIRST GENERATION OF CHINESE NET ART

" In 2006, when blogs were popular and readers subscribed to RSS feeds on Xiami or Google Reader, Miao came across a post on the popular group blog Boing Boing that inspired her to make Blind Spot (2007), her first work to specifically address the conditions of the Chinese internet. The thread of posts addressed the Great Firewall, the complex system of internet content control in China, with a list of terms of government- censored search results on Google.cn;"

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