MIAO YINGSpoils are fetched from wars unseen, leashed to glitter, trained to gleam
Upcoming Exhibition
Domgasse 6
1010 Vienna
12 Nov 2026 – 23 Jan 2027
read inGerman
Spoils are fetched from wars unseen, leashed to glitter, trained to gleam surveys a decade of Miao Ying's painting. Miao Ying, who was born and raised in China, was trained from childhood in socialist realist drawing and oil painting. In China, entry to an art academy is decided not by a portfolio but by standardized drawing and painting examinations. Painting is therefore both an inseparable part of her life and a skill acquired within a system. This experience of being domesticated mirrors her work's vigilance toward, and critique of, technology and politics, and has become an essential part of her practice. From the Effect series begun in 2016, to Training Landscapes begun in 2022, to Glorious Magic – Trained, mounted on wheeled wooden stands, her paintings never take their source from nature or from a subject. They come from digital stock libraries: Photoshop lighting presets, ready-made magic effects from games, and visual effects unlocked by AI systems as they train and battle. The technological battle itself is a black box; only its fireworks are visible. These materials were meant as supporting elements — lighting to set off a subject, landscapes as backdrops for a hero's journey — yet they have quietly come to dictate what contemporary images should look like. Miao Ying turns them from background into protagonist, and paints each one by hand. In Effect series, she copies computer effects designed for realism into oil, stroke by stroke: a painter rigorously trained in realism, clumsily reproducing the effects of a machine by hand, becomes a flesh printer. In Training Landscapes, glitch landscapes produced as a deep learning model trains inside a game engine are “imagined” into new images by a second AI system; she then paints them by hand, building them up in layers of glaze. Each painting takes its title from a rhyming poem written by GPT. In her paintings, two opposite directions of training meet: a human must unlearn her training in order to create; a machine must be trained in order to simulate creation. The trained and the trainer overlap on her canvas. As the exhibition title suggests, the unseen war is also a cold war waged with our data as ammunition; as for who fetches the spoils, who is leashed, and who is trained to gleam, the canvas offers no answer.
