About

Mu Yu Ming was born in 1971 in Kunming, Yunnan. He is Naxi — a descendant of the Mu Royal Family of Lijiang. He studied experimental art at the Norwegian Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo (1996–2000) and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2005–2007), supported by a joint scholarship from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

His work takes life itself as the primary medium. Over more than two decades of practice, he has worked across experimental film, performance, public art, social sculpture, and oil 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. His projects have included official collaborations with the governments of France (Himalaya, 2004) and New Zealand (Genealogy, 2009). His work has been archived by the Rijksakademie, the Norwegian Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Hungarian MEDIAWAVE Festival, and cultural departments in six countries.

In 2013, he entered ten years of deliberate public silence: no publications, no gallery exhibitions, no commercial or institutional art-world activity. The silence was the work — a large-scale life performance completed in 2022. Within it, he became a monk in Myanmar, built a rural art community in Anning, Yunnan (ChuangTzu Project, 2017–2019), and participated in public welfare for orphans in northern Myanmar.

Since 2022, he has been developing Five Hundred Arhats — a continuing project combining painting, sculpture, and performance — and has adopted the identity Hei Qiu'en for a phase of international public welfare practice in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His oil paintings — made throughout decades of travel through Yunnan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia — are the visible surface of a practice that has always been larger than what it leaves behind.