Asia
Miao Ying
Post commentary, monetary likes, Morgan Freeman’s advice on reality
2016
Post commentary, monetary likes, Morgan Freeman’s advice on reality, 2016 (Still)
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As part of her project Chinternet Plus, a “counterfeit ideology” and parodic take on the strategy “Internet Plus” launched by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang in 2015, the video work Post commentary, monetary likes, Morgan Freeman’s advice on reality gives an insight into Internet Culture in China. The brilliantly edited video by Miao Ying presents various scenes from a popular Chinese live-streaming platform together with extracts from a TV show featuring Morgan Freeman talking about “What Is Reality”. This work is exemplary of the artist’s practice, questioning, with a degree of humour, the sometimes dramatic consequences of the Internet as it consumes society.
Miao Ying’s practice, including video, installation, website, photography and painting, highlights attempts to discuss mainstream technology and contemporary consciousness and its impact on our daily lives, while accounting for new modes of politics, aesthetics and consciousness created through representation of reality through technology. Through her works she emphasises the fallacy of a global internet culture while simultaneously underscoring the undemocratic use of networked power in both China and other regions of the world, such as the United States. At the same time, her self-diagnosed Chinternet, (referring to China's online culture and media spheres), Stockholm syndrome celebrates the ingenuity, humour, and intelligence of Chinese internet users, and the rich visual culture they have cultivated behind the firewall. Her works often adopt many of these users’ creative workarounds, which are strategies she describes in positive terms as ‘self-censorship’. She interrogates the dialectical relationship between the Chinternet and the World Wide Web, unspooling and parodying complex issues of global capitalism, online propaganda, and media democracy.