About

Mu Yuming was born on March 23, 1971 in Kunming, Yunnan. He is Naxi — a descendant of the Mu Royal Family of Lijiang. He grew up on Wenlin Street in Kunming, began painting after a lakeside awakening at age 15, and by 17 had completed his first major commission and won the Yunnan provincial sketching championship.

He studied at the Norwegian Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo (1996–2000), Department of Experimental Art, on a Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholarship. In 2005–2006 he completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, supported by a joint scholarship from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the academy — one of Europe's most selective artist residencies.

His work takes life itself as the primary medium. Over more than three decades of practice, he has worked across experimental film, performance, public art, social sculpture, oil painting, and ink painting — refusing to remain within any single form. His core proposition, launched as a lifelong project in 2011 and practiced long before: Life is Art. Life is the Spiritual Field.

In 2003 he co-founded Lijiang Studio with American curator Jay Brown — one of Yunnan's earliest non-profit international artist residencies, connecting Yunnan and Tibet with Europe and the Americas. That same year he launched the 20 Days Project (Kunming → Oslo → Amsterdam → Brittany) and the Jiang Hu movement. In 2004 he collaborated with the French government on Himalaya; in 2009 with the New Zealand government on Genealogy, a project that contributed to the government's formal apology for the historical Poll Tax.

In 2013 he entered a ten-year arc of deliberate public silence: no publications, no gallery exhibitions, no commercial or institutional art-world activity. The silence was the work. Within it, he became a monk in Myanmar, built a rural art community in Anning, Yunnan (ChuangTzu → Zhuangzi Project, 2017–2019), completed a five-year retreat in Jingdezhen (2014–2019) — planned as three, extended to five — where he took the name Meng Chunshan (Dreaming Spring Mountain) and produced the Seed People (瓜子人) and Classic of Mountains and Seas · Heart Sutra (山海经心经) series. From 2018–2019 he conducted Maya and Dongba civilization field research across ten countries, overlapping the final phase of the retreat.

Since 2023 he has been working under the identity Hei Qiu'en (Black Ball En), a phase of international volunteer and public welfare art practice. Current projects include Our Children (Chiang Mai, focused on COVID-19 orphans), Tea Dana (a tea-as-medium performance practice across Lashihai and Chiang Mai), Five Hundred Arhats (a continuing painting-sculpture-performance work), My Flesh (a role performance art project), the Heaven on Earth ink series (Taining and Chiang Mai), and My Father — an ink handscroll painted on Huaniao Island in 2025 following his father's death.

His work moves between six named identities — Zhuangzi, Lao Mu, Farmer Mu, Xian Mu Guannian, Meng Chunshan, and Hei Qiu'en — each corresponding to a period and a mode of practice. Mu moves through them as different selves of a single life. His oil paintings, ink works, and performance documents are the visible surface of a practice that has always been larger than what it leaves behind.