Lijiang Studio

In 2003, Mu Yuming and American curator Jay Brown co-founded Lijiang Studio — one of Yunnan's first non-profit international artist residency platforms, in the ancient city of Lijiang.

The premise was structural: Yunnan — a province of extraordinary cultural richness, sitting at the crossroads of Tibetan, Southeast Asian, and Chinese civilisations — had no dedicated infrastructure for international artistic exchange. Lijiang Studio was built to create that infrastructure. Not as a gallery, not as a commercial project, but as a platform: a place where artists from different parts of the world could come to work, meet, and respond to one of China's most complex cultural landscapes.

Jay Brown brought international network and curatorial expertise. Mu Yuming brought deep roots in Yunnan — as a Naxi man from Lijiang, as someone whose family connection to the land went back generations. The collaboration was not decorative. Each brought what the other could not supply.

In 2004, the studio produced its first major publication: Lijiang China Studio/Residence — a catalogue documenting the residency program, the artists who had passed through, and the work made in the Lijiang context.

The catalogue was permanently collected by IberLibro, the international art book platform, and by other international art and cultural archives. It entered the institutional record not as a local artifact but as documentation of a genuinely international project — a Chinese residency seen and taken seriously from outside China.

The Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam subsequently included Lijiang Studio in its case studies of Chinese contemporary public art — a recognition that placed the project within the global discourse on art as social practice.

Lijiang Studio operated as a connective tissue between worlds that rarely encountered one another: Yunnan and Tibet on one side; Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas on the other.

For the artists who came through, the residency was an encounter with a China far from the dominant images of the country — not coastal, not metropolitan, not institutional. The Naxi culture of Lijiang; the mountain landscapes that formed the edge of the Tibetan plateau; the folk traditions and village structures of a part of China that had changed slowly and preserved what the cities had lost — these were the actual conditions in which the artists worked.

For Mu Yuming, the studio was also personal. It was a way of making something useful out of his position — a man who had been formed by both the Naxi world of his origin and the European contemporary art world of his training, and who understood what was possible when those two formations were placed in genuine contact.