Miao 
Ying was born in Shanghai in 1985, but in her bio for the exhibition “The Ballad of Generation Y” at OCAT, she says she resides on the Internet, the Chinese Internet and her smartphone. Her distinction between the Chinese Internet and the Internet is an important one. Sectioned off behind The Great Firewall, where major international sites such as Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Youtube and Instagram are blocked, and Chinese social media sites such as Weibo frequently censor trending topics, the Chinese Internet has evolved its own unique culture. It’s this culture that she explores in the installation “Holding a Kitchen Knife to Cut Internet Cable”.
The work is composed of six monitors displayed in front of two large panels — “Civilised Internet” and “Internet Civilisation”, both of which depict pictures of the Great Wall behind paintings of flora and flapping (as opposed to hoisting) cranes. The monitors display lyrical, sentimental phrases in Chinese and Chinglish rendered in what Miao calls a “Taobao 3D animated style”. It’s an exploration of a distinctly Chinese online diction and aesthetic.
How did you come up with the phrase “Holding a kitchen knife to cut Internet cable” for this work?
It was inspired by a ‘Chinese Internet poem’ that I found online and translated into Chinglish. The other half of the poem reads “a road with lightning sparks”. Poems like this, used as online signatures by Chinese Internet citizens, are ubiquitous across Chinese sites such as the most popular instant messaging service, QQ.
Many of the phrases are inscrutable to outsiders, and are further obscured by those Chinglish translations. What, for instance, does “hundred degrees cannot search your thirty degree smile” mean?
In Chinese, “bai” means hundred; “du” means degrees. This ‘hundred degrees’ is a double entendre for the Chinese search engine Baidu, which became the main search engine back in 2010 when Google left China. Maybe years later, the younger Chinese generation might think Google copied Baidu. This poem I found online; it reads, “The thirty degrees of your smile can not be found on Baidu.” I pictured this poem as depicting a heart-broken guy looking for his former girlfriend’s picture on Instagram. Her perfect, charming, unique smile cannot be found because Instagram is blocked in China. Therefore, he had to search for her smile on Baidu, aka: “Hundred degrees,” and found nothing.
Why are some Chinese Internet users so lyrical? Does it have something to do with a need to communicate indirectly and anonymously?
This series of works involved a large amount of research, reading and collecting online signatures. I usually picked the ones that were the most cheesily creative, which gave me a visual feeling about this poem. I like to pick ‘puppy love’ style Internet poems to describe my romantic relationship with the censorship which I have been focusing on since 2007. Over the years it has became a traumatic bond. My relationship with censorship is like developing “Stockholm syndrome”. This kind of love takes place in an isolated environment where the hostage-taker — who makes the rules — becomes so powerful that you gradually fall in love with them.
How frustrating is online censorship to you? Don’t you get most things you want from the Chinese intranet?
It’s very frustrating, but I’m used to it. Accepting censorship is like accepting a breakup: you get sad, pissed, going through all kinds of different phases. Censorship is like a nasty boyfriend you cannot tame.
After completing a BFA atthe China Academy of Fine Art’s new media department, you earned an MFA from the School of Art and Design at SUNY Alfred University. You described the move to America as like stumbling onto a nude beach, almost embarrassingly open. Did living in New York change your perception of online culture?
New York is great but China has its own online culture, not just censorship, but also ‘self-censorship’. Knowing something will be censored you can go around it by creating new words, which is the way most Chinese Internet memes are born. I am fascinated by the Chinese Internet.
I love your “Taobao 3D animated style”. It reminds me of one of the first Google logos, as well as those eye-catching animations on people’s Taobao stores. When did you first notice the style and how has it evolved?
I noticed the style first on Taobao and very soon people starting to use it on WeChat too, in both situations as advertisements. Later, people started to use it as stickers, not because they are 3D but because they are GIFs. I think the GIF is a magnificent format. It was created in the ’80s for the ‘slow Internet’ and got popular again in the social media age because of limited data plans. The software to make the wording is relatively easy to use compared to professional 3D software. This is the age of poor images and bad editing because of social media. In order to make a quick response, this is the age of amateurs not professionals.
In your animations and videos, you embrace a tacky, chaotic, 土 (unsophisticated) aesthetic. What do you like about tackiness?
Haha, I think China is very tacky. The aesthetics fail, or maybe tackiness is the contemporary aesthetic of China. I think there are many historical reasons behind it — it wasn’t always this ugly. Anyhow, now it is very ugly, almost too ugly. It goes beyond tacky; it is funky. I love funkiness.
The show you’re participating in at OCAT Shanghai is called “The Ballad of Generation Y”. Are you Generation Y or post ’80s or something else? What would you call the group of people who grew up around the same time as you who share important experiences and perspectives?
Yeah I think I am Generation Y, the post ’80’s. We are the generation who grew up with nintendo, computers and internet cafés, and we’re the first generation of only children, growing up along with the ‘reform and opening’ policy.
This article was originally posted on Flamingo’s online magazine Lens