Miao Ying
Happily Contained (2018) Virtual reality & video installation

Happily Contained is Miao Ying’s first work using virtual reality technology. Installed in the show apartments for the Embassy Gardens development in Nine Elms, Miao’s VR experience is conceived as a form of ‘lifestyle hypnotism’, casting the viewer as consumer on a journey in search of utopia and contemporary ideas of home. From post-war suburban American tract housing to Chinese ghost cities, she investigates the construction of identity and desire.

Miao’s virtual reality is a world of firewalls and filter bubbles in which brands and tropes of our internet age figure as the agents of real life struggles. The heads of Unicorn companies – startups worth over one billion US dollars, like twitter, Xiaomi and Airbnb – are the winners when Internet culture plays out a zero-sum game at the intersection of the virtual and the real

Miao Ying (b.1985, China) describes her place of residence as the internet and makes work online, in print and in installation. Her work often addresses the politics of the Chinternet – the Chinese Internet – and its ‘Great Firewall’. Often employing irony and humour, Miao revisits our contemporary relationship to technology and internet aesthetics; interrogating and intervening in the circulation of ideas, ideology and value in our everyday lives, online and off.

Embassy Gardens is a riverside district in Nine Elms beside the new US Embassy, which relocated to the area in 2018. Ying’s artwork will be juxtaposed with Ballymore’s ‘Design Cube’, a marketing suite showcasing the evolution of the area and prospective outcomes for the new phase of its development. Please note: this venue has limited capacity; entry will be on a first come, first served basis.

A co-commission by Art Night and dslcollection. Further support and site courtesy of EcoWorld Ballymore.

Further thanks to HTC Vive and MSI for their support.
A project realised in collaboration with Somewhere Else.

VR Production – Somewhere Else
3D & Animation – MMCD
VR Development – Mbryonic