Mu Yuming is nestled deep in the rolling mountains of the northwest Yunnan plateau.The town is called Lijiang, an open city with virtually no gates built by the Naxi(dominant ethnic group in Lijiang) headman, whose family name was, by no coincidence,Mu—an ancestor of the artist. We meet at the town center and start the climb up to his studio in the northern end of the old Lijiang. Along the walk we see a bird’s-eye view of the hills, roofs of the traditional Naxi houses and their lush courtyards—and water is a constant companion, flowing either in a stream at my side or in tunnels beneath our feet.
The stunning landscape is a good omen.

A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Mu Yuming lived in Norway for ten years. Following his two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, he recently moved back to his homeland of snow-clad mountains, pure and sacred, to make art, but also ready to receive incoming guests from afar. And send of those who are outgoing.

Soon, we arrive at his studio and meet his friends-cum-colleagues, who are all busy planning projects for the international artist residency half an hour outside town, which Mu jump-started a number of years ago with his American colleague Jay Brown. The studio is in the attic. His color-drenched canvases adorn the walls, some propped up against each other. A pair of red underwear (for auspicious times) is stabbed with a knife on one of the beams of the studio. Sunflower shells cover the floors. Mu Yuming is in fact addicted to sunflower seeds and eats them surreptitiously, all day long, leaving theshells on the ground among his works on paper.

Mu Yuming, like his studio, is full of energy. He started painting when he was four or five-years old and living in a courtyard house in the old town of Lijiang. His first artworks were chalk drawing of the chickens, his parents’ dog, and the jasmine-scented flowers he would watch in his family’s house. In typical Mu fashion, he says, that he may not be any better now than he was then. However, painting came to his rescue at a few points in his life, especially during his darkest hours when he felt as if he had lost his jingshen (vitality/life spirit). He began to paint as a form of meditation, using this language to discover the separation between his mind and body. His hope was to bring them back together. In fact, be it in the form of text, video, daily drawings, spontaneousink paintings, or guerilla performance pieces, he is constantly creating scenarios in his work that continue this personal journey, both inside and outside.

Mu Yuming’s earlier works were more offhanded, disorderly and random. He chose to apply his paint following intuition and passion, albeit with a sloppy authority. Combining traditional Chinese ink and Dongba hieroglyphics, he smeared quantities of color onto Dongba prayer-flag-like textile pieces to depict scenes he associates with his inner life. And, unlike many of his Chinese contemporaries, he had struck a balance between seemingly contradictory forces: control and spontaneity, the mundane and the utopian,primitivism and contemporary imagery. His tone was festive and exuberant.

More recently, his works have grown slicker, but also more introspective. Now his canvases are populated by figures wearing stretched hoods and with mask-like faces, painted against abstract fields jammed with chairs, guns, ruined monuments, and words. While retaining the artist’s contemplation on life and his intuitive vitality, these works do not always offer full narratives; they aren’t pure abstractions either. They feel unstable, the figures searching for something, not necessarily taking a stand, but seemingly engaged in some kind of struggle.

The overt subject is an artist on the move, sandwiched between cultures, homelands, and languages. His themes explore the range of tensions between people of different cultures, countries and backgrounds, rendered against a landscape of total solitude. The works are filled with his thoughts of his past, spent in China, and of his present, where he finds himself trotting the globe.

MY: I use the world as my studio, traveling continuously as a reaction to my Chinese identity. In Buddhist tradition, monks roam around the country on their spiritual journeys. Red Dust refers to the image that they leave in their trail, yet as an atheist and aesthetic Chinese, I never had the chance to experience this myself. Growing up in a country with harsh travel restrictions and where creativity was condemned made me want the world even more. Therefore I left as a reaction against this and ironically as a means of understanding my home from a distance.

Growing up in Lijiang, being half Han and half Naxi, Mu says that he always felt like the outsider. This struggle has been the primary engine that has driven his paintings.

MY: The Naxi culture is completely different than the Han majority with its own language, customs and traditions, yet I never felt truly comfortable with this dual identity. The art community offered me refuge. There I felt comfortable in my own skin. Feeling like a foreigner in my own country, I had to leave to understand it from outside, which in a sense is where I had always been.

While his recent return from Amsterdam has inspired some notable shifts in the content of his works, such as to a keen focus on local people in his paintings, Mu has deliberately distanced himself from the Chinese political and historical themes that have marked many of his contemporaries’ works. Though he admits:

MY: On return to Lijiang I sensed more than ever the massive change in the soul and mind of the Chinese. More than ever so many Chinese people are focused on objects, making money, buying things. So many people in China now have so much money and they’re all fighting to get more. Everyone seems to have lost interest in the soul and who we are as humans. That’s the great sadness in China today. Perhaps in the whole world—but it just feels so intensified in China.

To depict this sadness on a surface, Mu Yuming recently took on portraiture works, which he sees as active trials in how to translate human psychology. To him, portraiture is a way to collect the subjects’ stories and paint their faces, with all the wisdom of compassion and secret knowledge that is revealed in their features. So he jumps into the act of painting—to create—and in the process, he is shares his energy with the subject at hand.

MY: It was like the people in my portraits would shed layers of their skin and lay themselves quite bare in front of me. Even if I had been friends with these people for ten years or so I felt, in the midst of the painting process, that I was just getting to know them in a new and fresh way. They were like live objects, and in the process of painting I could travel into their lives. The whole physical and mental process of painting was again very enjoyable to me, in a way it had not been for years. For example, in two of the portraits, two of the sitter’s are prostitutes. One of the girls was sixteen and I met her after her first day at work. The other had been working in the red light district of Lijiang for over ten years. When both of them were sitting in my studio they really opened up. I was amazed by their understanding and comprehension of art. When we started discussing art it was as though we had known each other for other 100 years. The 16 year old confessed she couldn’t talk to anyone else the way she could to me.

Even though Mu Yuming says that he is not always patient enough to work within narrowly prescribed limits in order to explore the parameters of an idea, there was his 20 Days Project, a series of performances he co-organized in which a core group of performers produced a new activity each day for 20 days. Each day the group went out and engaged in their surroundings, a glassy clear lake in Norway, or the city of Kunming, China. The day’s work was recorded then exhibited that day. These were intense, collaborative projects, yielding unpredictable results.

Performances as such remain a necessity to him. It’s about research, discovering life in detail, changing the natural state of things, and the very notion of possibilities. In fact, Mu Yuming makes no clear distinction between his performances and paintings. He views both as working structures with a solely focused on the transfer of experience— which ultimately enables one to become a fuller human being.

The oscillation between different styles and media reflects his distaste for singular conclusions. Mu Yuming is always on the lookout for different strategies of working, trying out new styles and ways of combining works. He uses painting like his performances—as a language of experience that is both inwardly and outwardly directed. It is a way to discover for himself how artists view the world and exist as human beings.

And when he paints, he feels his brain more connected to his body and to nature. His aspiration, he says, is to work like Einstein: to look at life from different angles, dig realities beyond appearances and try to understand humanity in its details, maybe all in order to accomplish something entirely new.

How about the role of spirituality in his work? Mu Yuming has the five elements Chinese medicine theory (whereby the medical practitioner views the human body as a microcosm of the outside world) and “Dong Ba Culture” (a belief in the super natural gods and their rule over the world that incorporates elements from Lamaism, Buddism and Dao) to his credit.

MY: The world and the human are comprised of the five elements of water, wind, earth, fire and wood, with any disharmony bringing about disease. My paintings are composed of five parts; five elements if you like, yet while Taoist thought emphasizes harmony and balance, my paintings are a deliberate composition of chaos and disorder. My images pull from five elements that theoretically should not come together. In combining these traditions with the influences of pop art, Abstract Expressionism and graffiti, I force a deliberate postmodern “crash” that mirrors my two faces, which are in a constant battle themselves as they examine the boundaries of self. In modern life many of us have lost the balance between the five original elements and through painting can recognize theimbalance and reclaim it as a real consequence to one’s life.

Dongba shaman (which means “ wise man” and can be a witch doctor, scholar, or craftsman, as well as an artist) is an archetype that Mu Yuming is acutely aware of in his observations of daily life, which he sees within the context of his larger, priest-like mindfulness. There are many references to Dongba Culture in his works, which are about the contrast between ancient practices and the spiritual poverty of modern society, the constant duality in nature between people and cultures, and, at the end of the day, the pointlessness of it all. Suffice it to say these cultural pointers from his heritage have inspired him to confront his world from an entirely new perspective

In regards to the art world, Mu Yuming is distanced. He considers his existence in the art world to be temporary, as one step toward his great goal in life, that is, to become Farmer Mu: an average farmer. And he says if he were left alone to his devices, Mu Yuming would only make art. With his rare ability to combine both pigment and performance on one surface, he would expand on unpredictable variations as in traditional Chinese medicine and turn his paintings into philosopher’s stones that reinforce his desire for utopia.

MY: I have many friends here but my real loves are my paintings and canvas. I am a lonely farmer in love with my canvas. My body and mind are telling me to be alone and to make more time for thinking, reading and painting. Farmers have a simple life.
Farmers wake up, work, eat, sleep and today I do the same thing. My life is like that of a farmer. I needed to live in the country, as I wanted to live near the earth, be close to nature and to be simple and true.

Defne Ayas, Shanghai 2007

Special thanks to the artist and his friend Emma for sharing their conversation transcript during my writing of this text.