VIENNA.- In her first solo museum exhibition in Europe, Miao Ying draws an unusual analogy between artificial intelligence (AI) and animals. At Belvedere 21, the Chinese artist investigates society’s relationship with AI-driven systems both critically and playfully, offering a fresh perspective on a group of technologies that are increasingly permeating our day-to-day lives.
For nearly two decades, Miao Ying (born 1985 in Shanghai) has been interrogating the social impacts of digital infrastructure in her art. Her generation came of age with the early internet, the one-child policy, and digital censorship in China, and her work deeply engages with mechanisms of surveillance, control, and media manipulation. In recent years, her artistic practice has increasingly centered on AI. Even as algorithmic systems become commonplace, their inner workings remain largely concealed. Miao Ying responds to these developments with questions of her own: How are these technologies influencing our perceptions? What ideas and expectations are we projecting onto them?
Stella Rollig, Belvedere General Director: With Miao Ying, we are showcasing an international artist at the crossroads of art, technology, and digital culture. Her multimedia works vividly illustrate the scope of AI’s interventions in our everyday lives, while also presenting a nuanced and unexpectedly funny view of a technology that is significantly shaping our present and future. The exhibition invites us to observe the often-hidden mechanisms of digital systems and their social effects.
The spatial installation developed specifically for Belvedere 21 centers on the artwork Perfect Sameness Makes Difference, live simulation on PC (2026). Two large LED screens display abstract visual worlds that are generated continuously in real time by AI systems using parameters defined by Miao Ying. This data-intensive process relies on a technical framework developed in collaboration with scientists at Cornell University. Using these images as its input, a second AI generates and plays an ever-evolving sound composition in real time. Arranged like a stage set, the gallery space combines paintings and sculptural elements to form an immersive installation: a physical, spatial counterpart to digital processes.
The exhibition title—Come, Sit, Stay—invokes standard commands from dog training, a reference to the human desire to control and dominate complex technologies. With this unconventional analogy, Miao Ying introduces a new angle into contemporary discourse around AI. This comparison proves to be a calculated artistic intervention, making AI’s underlying mechanisms more accessible while considering how we can play more active and accountable roles in shaping technological developments.
Since 2019, the artist has also drawn on historical imaginaries around magic, alchemy, and wizardry. The exhibition places these themes in dialogue with the enigmatic processes of artificial intelligence. Now that the complexity of algorithmic systems defies even experts’ grasp, public discourse frequently treats these systems as mysterious or even magical.
In the words of curator Sergey Harutoonian, Rather than treating AI as a purely technological phenomenon, Miao Ying investigates the cultural narratives, hopes, and fears bound up with it. In the process, she merges supposed opposites: magic and algorithms, digitally generated images and handmade paintings, control and unpredictability. Her works open up new ways of thinking about how we want to coexist with intelligent machines.
Linking digital technologies with traditional media is a hallmark of Miao Ying’s work. By translating algorithmic processes into physical form, she reconsiders society’s relationship with AI through a new lens. Instead of framing human and machine as opposites, Come, Sit, Stay considers their reciprocal relationship and calls attention to the qualities that distinguish human behavior: imperfection, creativity, and the capacity to cope with uncertainty.
Curated by Sergey Harutoonian.
Assistant Curator: Vasilena Stoyanova
