“For one full year, the only art I made was being alive for someone else.”
The Proposition
In 2010, Mu Yuming implemented 《将自己布施出去一年》 — Give Myself Away for a Year — a performance art project with the simplest possible description and among the most demanding possible executions.
For one full year: no payment accepted. No art-world activity conducted in the name of art. No gallery submissions, no institutional applications, no commercial engagements. Instead: social services, folk labor, and public welfare. The body as the only medium. The work as lived rather than made.
布施 — the term used in the Chinese title — is a Buddhist concept: the practice of giving without expectation of return, of offering what one has to others without attachment to outcome or recognition. The word locates the project within a spiritual and ethical framework that the secular language of 'service' or 'volunteerism' does not quite reach.
The Year
The year was spent in Yunnan — in the communities, villages, and social spaces that had already become the primary territory of Mu Yuming's practice through Farmer Station.
Social services: direct participation in the activities of community life — the unglamorous, unreported, necessary work of maintaining the fabric of daily existence. Folk labor: working with and alongside ordinary people in their actual occupations — farming, building, carrying, preparing. Public welfare: engagement with those whose needs were most acute, without the mediation of an institutional structure.
The body was the medium in a literal sense: Mu Yuming's physical presence, labor, and attention were what was given. There was no object produced, no image made, no documentation assembled for an archive. The giving was the work.
What It Tested
Give Myself Away for a Year was a direct test of a question Mu Yuming had been approaching from multiple directions: can art be lived rather than made?
The dominant models of contemporary art required objects: paintings, sculptures, installations, films, photographs. Even performance art typically produced documentation that could be exhibited, sold, and archived. The art world required something it could hold.
Give Myself Away produced nothing that could be held. It was a pure duration — a year of being, not making. The question it posed was whether that could count as art at all; and if it could, what that counting meant for every other kind of art that surrounded it.