“Life can only be understood from a position inside it — never from outside looking in.”
The First Major Work
In 2000, newly graduated from the Norwegian Royal Academy of Fine Arts — where he had studied experimental art from 1996 to 2000 — Mu Yuming completed his first major work: an experimental short film titled 《杀》, Killing.
The film does not dramatise violence. It investigates it. Working in the mode of experimental cinema — stripped of narrative convention, oriented toward duration, image, and affect — Killing confronts the essence of life through its most extreme negation. The film asks what violence actually is: not as spectacle or sensation, but as a fundamental condition that shadows human existence.
This was the first completed statement of an artistic intelligence that had spent four years absorbing the experimental traditions of European contemporary art — and was now turning that formation back toward the questions that had brought him there: what is a life? what does it mean to end one? what separates the act from the instinct?
Asian Experimental Art Film Festival
Killing was selected for the Asian Experimental Art Film Festival — a confirmation of the film's standing within the international experimental art circuit, and of Mu Yuming's emergence as a significant voice in Chinese experimental practice.
The film then toured Norway and multiple countries across Asia. For a Chinese artist who had trained in Europe and was returning to engage with Asian contemporary art, the tour was both a homecoming and a declaration. The work was not made for a single location or institution. It moved.
Killing remains the foundation of Mu Yuming's experimental film and media practice — the first proof that his approach to art as investigation, as confrontation, as life-question rather than life-decoration, was fully formed from the beginning.