“Everything that comes after lives inside this one.”
The Frame
In 2011, Mu Yuming launched 《游戏人间》 — Life as Game — and declared it a lifelong art project. It is not a project with a subject, a location, a material, or a planned conclusion. It is a frame: a decision about how to relate to existence itself.
The core proposition is three words: Life is Art. Not 'art reflects life' or 'art comments on life' or even 'art is for life.' Life is Art — the identity between the two terms is complete. Every action, every relationship, every decision, every daily behavior, every spiritual practice, every encounter is, in principle, an act of creation.
This is not a new idea. It has roots in Dadaism, in Joseph Beuys' expanded concept of art, in Zen practice, in certain strands of Taoist thought. What is specific to Mu Yuming is the insistence on living it — not as a theoretical proposition but as a continuous practice, tested against actual life, for as long as life continues.
What It Contains
Life as Game is not a project that runs alongside other projects. It is the project that contains all other projects.
The Ten Years of Silence (2013–2022): a project within Life as Game. The ChuangTzu Project (2017–2019): a project within Life as Game. Five Hundred Arhats (2022–): a project within Life as Game. OUR CHILDREN (2023–): a project within Life as Game. She Nian Fo (2025): a project within Life as Game.
This structural relationship is not merely organizational. It is a claim about artistic intention. Each specific project, however finite its duration, however concrete its location, however specific its community, is also — in this framing — part of an ongoing investigation into what a human life can be when it is treated as a creative act from beginning to end.
游戏人间
The Chinese title deserves attention: 游戏人间 — wandering through the human world as play, as game, as free movement through experience.
游戏 — yóuxì — means game, play, sport. It carries connotations of lightness, freedom, non-attachment to outcome. To play a game is to be inside a set of rules without those rules constituting the whole of reality. The player is engaged but not trapped; committed but not desperate.
人间 — rénjiān — means the human world: the world of ordinary life, social relationships, mundane experience, suffering and joy. Not the world of the spirit alone, not the world of art institutions, but the world that most people actually inhabit.
Life as Game proposes that the human world can be engaged with the spirit of play: seriously, fully, but without the rigidity that comes from treating any outcome as final. This is at once an artistic proposition and a spiritual one — and in Mu Yuming's practice, the two are not distinct.