An Illusory Character Made in China

From 2005 to 2007, Mu Yuming held an artist-in-residence position at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam — one of the most prestigious postgraduate residency programmes in the world, funded jointly by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Rijksakademie. The residency brings together approximately fifty artists from around the world each year, working in individual studios within the academy's historic complex.

It was during this residency that Mu Yuming made and presented 《一个制造于中国的虚幻人物》 — An Illusory Character Made in China — a solo exhibition that became one of his most discussed works of the period.

The title is precise and deliberately uncomfortable. 'Made in China' carries in the West a specific set of associations — mass production, cheap goods, global supply chains, the erasure of the individual in favour of the standardised. An Illusory Character Made in China takes these associations and applies them to a subject: a person. A Chinese artist, living in Amsterdam, making work in a European institution.

What does it mean to be 'made in China' as a person? The work does not offer a simple answer. It is not a straightforward critique of Western stereotypes of China, nor a straightforward defence of Chinese identity. It is an investigation of the processes by which any person — but in this case, a Chinese artist in Europe — comes to be constituted: by ethnicity, by education, by geography, by the institutional contexts that validate or invalidate their work.

The conceptual installations and performance documents that made up the exhibition refused easy resolution. They asked the viewer to sit with the discomfort of cultural identity as a construction — something made, not found; produced, not given.

The same year, 2005, Mu Yuming also mounted a dual solo exhibition — 《伟大革命的时期》, The Period of the Great Revolution — simultaneously in Marseille, France, and Lijiang, China.

The simultaneity was itself the statement. The same artist, the same period, two cities on opposite sides of the world — one European port city with its own histories of revolution, migration, and cultural collision; one ancient Naxi city in the mountains of Yunnan, carrying its own histories of the same. Social memory and personal experience met in two places at once, asking what 'revolution' means when it is not a public event but a private condition: the experience of living between worlds, at a time of great change, without a fixed address.