The start of 2020 was great! the IEA welcomed Ying Miao (Electronic Integrated Arts MFA 2009) to the IEA for an NYSCA visual art residency. January 6-10 is a quiet time of the year during the academic winter break, none the less the dedicated staff of Expanded Media gave great support to Ying’s residency. Ying ran several tests with the epilog laser cutter and settled on maple faced plywood for a WIP series. Another series based on similar imagery was digitally-printed on Three-ply Xuan paper. Ying ran digital print tests earlier in the week, before deciding on the editions. One of the editions was printed on a handmade Amate Bark paper sourced from Mexico. The paper, coupled with Ying’s contemporary software aesthetics with gothic-y font, and text of romantic longing, gives the series a tension between ahistorical popular aesthetics and historical hand labor materials. And within this tension Ying cooly uses the materials and content to humorously propose a critique of propaganda, particularly the romantic guise of contemporary personality cults which are exploited by social-political control systems.

Miao Ying was born in Shanghai, China. She holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and a BFA in New Media Arts from China Academy of Fine Arts. She resides in New York and Shanghai.
 Her works inhabit multiple forms and highlights the attempts to discuss mainstream technology and contem-porary 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. She deliberately applies a thread of humor to her works and addresses her Stockholm Syndrome relationship with cultural and socio-political power, such as censorship and self-censorship, algorithmic filter bubbles, political lifestyle branding and ideologies in general.

Her most recent museum solo exhibitions include: “Hardcore Digital Detox”, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2018, “ Miao Ying：Chinternet Plus ”, First Look: New Art Online (New Museum, New York, 2016), “Holding a Kitchen Knife to Cut the Internet Cable” (Folklore of the cyber world: an online Exhibition for the Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2015). She has shown her works at the “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics” (New Museum, New York, 2019), “Chinese Whisper” (Museum Fur Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, 2019). Vienna Biennale, (Kunsthalle Vienna, Vienna, 2019), ”The 12th Gwangju Biennale” (Gwangjiu, South Korea), “.com/.cn” (co-presented by MoMA PS1 and K11 Art Foundation, 2017), “After Us” (co-presented by New Museum and K11 Art Foundation, 2017), “The New Normal—Art and China in 2017” (UCCA Center For Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2017), “Secret Surface” (Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2016), etc. She has been nominated for many awards and is the winner of 2018-19 Porsche “Young Chinese Artist of the Year”.