Miao Ying's Digital Works Explore China's Internet Culture and Censorship
In her 2014 digital pieces, Miao Ying critiques the online landscape of China through Internet art with works like LAN Love Poem and iPhone Garbage. LAN Love Poem showcases screenshots of inaccessible sites such as Google and Facebook, set against pixelated backdrops, highlighting issues of cyber sovereignty and censorship. It incorporates Taobao's 3-D typography and "Internet poems" from QQ signatures, emphasizing Chinglish. iPhone Garbage parodies a Bilibili video that promotes Jin Li smartphones, deriding iPhones as worthless. Both artworks interact with the "Chinese Internet," dominated by platforms like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, influenced by the Great Firewall. Ros Holmes's 2018 article in ARTMargins discusses how Miao's creations address socio-political themes while celebrating the quirky aspects of Chinese online culture.
Key facts
- Miao Ying created LAN Love Poem and iPhone Garbage in 2014
- The works critique China's Internet censorship and cyber sovereignty
- LAN Love Poem features screenshots of blocked sites like Google and Facebook
- iPhone Garbage remixes a Bilibili video promoting Jin Li smartphones
- China has 731 million Internet users and 695 million mobile phone users
- Chinese web giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu dominate the local market
- The Great Firewall restricts access to global websites without a VPN
- Ros Holmes published an article on these works in ARTMargins in 2018
Entities
Artists
- Miao Ying
Institutions
- ARTMargins
- University of Oxford
- Christ Church
- Oxford Art Journal
- The China Journal
- The China Quarterly
- Yishu
- Alibaba
- Tencent
- Baidu
- Taobao
- Bilibili
- YouTube
- Amazon
- Ebay
- Adobe
- HTML5
- MIT Press Journals
Locations
- China
- Oxford
- United Kingdom
- Mainland China
- Silicon Valley