MIAO Ying

Miao Ying’s works inhabit multiple forms and highlights the attempts to discuss mainstream technology and contemporary consciousness and its impact on our daily lives, along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and consciousness created during the representation of reality through technology. Miao 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. Miao has shown her works at Vienna Biennale 2019; M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2018); New Museum, New York (2019, 2017, 2016); Gwangju Biennale 2018; Hayward Gallery, London (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2017); K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2017); UCCA for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017); Venice Biennale 2015, Chinese Pavilion. She is the winner of Porsche Young Chinese Artist of the year 2018-2019.

Pilgrimage into Walden Twelve–The Honor of Shepherds
“Adventures in the Middle Kingdom” is a live simulation software that can be run on computer and smartphone. The simulation has three distinct chapters: The Honor of Shepherds, The People’s Quest, and Battle for Glorious Spells. The project is inspired by AI (artificial intelligence) neural network machine learning, medieval Christian indulgences mechanisms, conflicting political ideologies, popular online Chinese S&M romance novels, and the recently emerged “social credit system” in China. The simulation takes place in a medieval magical fantasy land—The Middle Kingdom. During the medieval era, the institution interpreted the religious ideology for the people who were illiterate, which led believers to exchange money for their sins—the indulgence system. The social credit system in China is a digital indulgence system, which records big data from its citizens and rewards or punishes them according to their social credit score. In a structure similar to that of the medieval church, the Chinese government explains the Marxist doctrine to its people and has implemented the technology to enforce citizen behavior.
The first chapter, The Honor of Shepherds, shows 6 AI “social shepherds” who represent different classes: urban migrant worker, outsourced American farmer, kung fu master, Chinese hero, bourgeois ruling class golfer, and sophisticated intelligentsia. All 6 characters have different AI brains. Each shepherd is trained on millions of examples of human-like movement patterns as a metaphor of big data and are scored according to a deviation from a set of ideal expressions. The shepherds try to minimize the difference between what they believe is a correct movement to express and what is known to be the true movements shown in the data using neural network supervised learning.
All chapters are live simulations, each time you run the software, it will appear differently. The reality of present China could be a simulated plausible future to the rest of the world.