A pair of hands in red gloves holds a chain of locks.

Miao Ying, Love’s Labours Lost, 2018. Still from video.

Miao Ying, Love’s Labours Lost, 2018

Artist: Miao Ying

Title: Love’s Labours Lost

Year: 2018

Medium: Digital video

Dimensions: tbc

Accession Number: US2018-16

Acquisition info:

Love’s Labours Lost explores Miao’s own relationship with China’s hyper-regulated online realm. She views the experience as a kind of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ – a traumatic bonding, particularly felt by artists of her generation – the first to grow up through the digital age with China’s current internet policies. In this work Miao collects ‘love locks’ left by lovers on the bridges of Paris as a metaphor for the complex and conflicted relationship between internet users, technology, security, and access.

From her website: Miao’s practice highlights the attempts to discuss mainstram technology and contemporary consciousness and its impact on our daily lives, along with the new modes of politics and aesthetics created during the representation of reality through technology. She deliberately applies a thread of humour to her work, and addresses her ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ relationship with cultural and socio-political power, such as censorship, self-censorship, algorithmic filter bubbles, political lifestyle branding, and ideologies in general.

Miao Ying 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. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hardcore Digital Detox, M+ Museu, Hong Kong (2018) and Chinternet Plus – First Look: New Art Online, New Museum, New York (2016).

Co-commissioned for the exhibition ‘Chinternet Ugly’ (2019) at CFCCA.

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