When I first saw Yijing Miao’s work, the seductive surfaces drew me immediately, they are plastic, sugar, resin, polymers… materials often dismissed as cheap or artificial. In her hands, however, they are reanimated with texture and vitality. Her exaggerated sculptures and installations are sweet in colour, sticky in texture, and gleaming with a faintly unsettling sheen. You think they look so weird at the beginning, but as you approached them, at that moment, everything in the environment becomes part of the work.
In her representative piece micro-+plastics, Miao transforms the invisible global issue of microplastic pollution into an immersive sensory experience. Viewers are invited to place a bottle of resin fragments symbolise the microplastics each of us generates daily at the centre of the installation. Each placement triggers a low-frequency vibration, allowing “pollution” to resonate audibly through the air. Data ceases to be abstract statistics; it becomes breath, pulse, and bodily extension. So, pollution is no longer an external disaster but part of our own circulatory system.
Another piece, Ac’me, turns inward to body and identity. Using expired candies and flexible materials, Miao constructed a landscape that resembled “skin”. The surface is soft in colour and glows, but over time it collapses, oozes and emits a sweet and sour scent. The coexistence of sweetness and decay creates a complex sensory experience that is both tantalising and repulsive. It evokes the adolescent body full of desire, shame, and restlessness, while also alluding to contemporary anxieties around the “perfect body” and “pure identity.”
Though these two works seem to address different themes “environment and body” which they in fact converge on a shared question.
From her existing works such as micro-+plastics and Ac’me, it is clear that Miao is not merely discussing environmental issues; she is situating the human, body, identity within the ecological system itself. She refuses to treat “the human” as an isolated subject. Instead, she sees it as a being coexisting and intermingling with matter: both shaped by and shaping its environment. What she explores is that boundary: how material forms the body, and how identity flows between matter and environment.
In other words, she seeks to dissolve traditional dichotomies such as subject and matter, nature and artifice, environment and body. She allows the body to resonate with its surroundings; identity becomes an effect within material flux rather than a fixed label. This very ambition drives her practice, explaining why “matter”, “instability”, “residue” and “permeation” repeatedly emerge as her core imagery.
I believe Miao’s true pursuit lies not merely in addressing the “environmental crisis” or “physical exposure”, but rather in how perception itself becomes an entry point into the political.
In her vision, matter, the body and identity are not merely subjects of art, but pathways for contemplation, critique and resistance. Her art does not simply narrate tales of ecology, the body or identity, but uses these narratives to reshape how we perceive the world is how we see, hear, touch and breathe. Sensory experiences, sometimes painful, visceral or unsettling, become a new form of political tension, compelling viewers to confront reality through their own bodies.
Yet this path is fraught with peril. Miao must continually seek equilibrium between the allure of form and the sharpness of concept: should her work become overly visually “beautiful”, it risks catering to the art world’s appetite for spectacle; should it become excessively obscure, it may lose its perceptual power. Her future challenge may well lie here, in avoiding the reduction of this “politics of perception” to mere sensory spectacle, while preserving its profound insight into the interplay between identity, the body, and materiality.
Perhaps this is precisely why her work defies simple categorisation. It concerns the environment, yet equally the body; visually captivating, yet intellectually incisive and profound. She contemplates through materials, argues through the senses, and resists through the body. Her art reminds us that in this era dominated by images and data, true politics may reside in the subtle, viscous, and immeasurable realms: in the very world of perception itself.
@miao_work
MA Royal College of Art
