is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Rotterdam and Shanghai. Working across installation, film, and writing, she critically examines various forms of knowledge-making infrastructure, investigating the material, semiotic, and social systems through which ideology is shaped, circulated, or manipulated.
RECENT“Time, in a Volkstuin”, essay film in-progress presentation, NoR Festival, Rotterdam, NL, 28–30 Aug 2026
GROUP SHOWS
Strange Characters as part of “bOre” exhibition, United Cowboys, Eindhoven, NL ⟶
2025
Rights of Passage(s) in DAE Graduation Show, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, NL ⟶
2025
Theatre of Internationalism, in exhibition “Essential Interest to Dutch Culture”, Kruisstraat 185, Eindhoven, NL ⟶
2025
The Feed Factor in “Soils”
exhibition, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL ⟶
2024
The Prosthetic Memory screening at Melted Film Festival,
Eindhoven, NL ⟶
2024
Deep Simulator art book in “Unknown Games” exhibition, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, CHN
2021
Collection of Research on Chinese Typography publication in
“Radical
Return” exhibition, Boston University
Art Galleries, US ⟶
2021
TALKS
“Autonomous Publishing: taking root on the move”, Pecha Kucha talk at Graphic Design Fair, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL, 2026
“Maintenance, Methods, Moves”, reading session with Landscape of Positions project, Founation We Are, Eindhoven, NL, 2026
“The Type: Evolving Typography Education in Chinese”, presentation at ATypI conference, Copenhagen, DK, 2025
“Design research and independent publishing, an alternative knowledge production”, talk at Common Imprint reading room, Berlin, DE
2024
“Why visual culture is a good
lens to observe your city”, TEDxChengdu, CHN
2020
PUBLICATIONST journal, iss.1–50 (The Type, 2018–2022); editorial director
Collection of Research on Chinese Typography (The Type, 2020); executive editor, co- author, producer
Uncovered Signs in Shanghai (The Type, 2020); executive editor, producer
EDUCATION
M.A. Information Design
(cum laude, best thesis)
Design Academy Eindhoven, NL
B.A. Translation & Interpretation
Fudan University, Shanghai, CHN
mira.ying(at)gmail(dot)com
Instagram
Tuin is the Message
Essay film
Starring Tuinderslust, a 91-year-old allotment garden in Rotterdam, the film traces the connection between land, time, and people, re-reading its aesthetics through a socio-economic lens.
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Archive as Reincarnation
Collage
Three vastly different books share a similar attempt to re-enact the past of the revolutionary left. By performatively stitching together sparse fragments from the three books, the collage attempts to magnify their dual nature of being both insufficient and interrogative.
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Rights of Passage(s)
Installation
Re-assemblage of a pervasive yet invisible border regime that shapes contemporary cultural production.
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Strange Characters
Installation
Ongoing research into how 19th-century Chinese letterpress materials brought from Hong Kong to the Netherlands witnessed intersecting colonial histories and an asymmetric mode of world knowledge-making.
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Theatre of Internationalism
Assemblage
When precarious bodies package themselves into cultural assets that play their preferred roles in a state-friendly multiculturalism, they keep paperwork always in order to navigate quotidian border configurations.
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Prosthetic Memory
Essay film
A choreography of archive footage delving into the pivotal role of women as the memory extension to the machine in the history of computing and automation.
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The Feed FactorInstallation
Investigating the industrial history of compound animal feed in the Netherlands and how their operational aesthetics fueled
old hopes and new crises for modern
human beings.
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…In Case Nobody’s Asked You…Data-based programmed animation
Looking into the phenomenon of aestheticised expression of loneliness on social media where algorithmic mechanisms both foster and consume one’s state of mind and mental health.
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Earth Station Eindhoven
Tea CeremonyLecture performance
Exploring rituals as embodied
acts of archiving, the ceremony presented a group research that exercises the collective act of knowledge-making and counter-mapping in the climate crisis.
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51 Personae: Tarwewijk
(Dutch, Chinese, English)Art publishingA collection of letters written over 2019–2021 by mariëlle verdijk to Chen Yun, recording her observations as she took recurring walks through Tarwewijk, a district closely related to flour production and immigrant communities in Rotterdam.
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Deep Simulator
(English, Chinese)Meta-game art publishingA cyberdrama-novel in which trajectories are generated by reader’s page-turning decisions. Based on the namesake video meta-game collaborated by artist aaajiao (Berlin) and author Ag (Shanghai), the work is built around the Buddhist idea of Bardo, the liminal state between life and death, and prompts players to reclaim their subjectivity in a hyper-mediated reality.
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T
vol. 1–50Editorial curation
Digital journal of visual culture criticism published by independent research collective The Type during 2018–2022.
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