“Meng Chunsheng knows the rules. Chun Mengsheng knows the truth.”
The Two Names
《俺的肉》 — My Flesh — is a role performance art project launched in 2023, built around two characters whose relationship is encoded in their names.
梦春生 — Meng Chunsheng — and 春梦生 — Chun Mengsheng — are exact reversals of each other. The three characters 梦, 春, 生 — dream, spring, life — rearrange to produce two distinct names, two distinct identities, two distinct ways of being in the world. The same material, configured differently.
梦 means dream. 春 means spring — youth, renewal, desire. 生 means life, birth, livingness. Arranged one way, they produce a person. Arranged the other way, they produce a different person. Both persons are made of the same substance. Neither is more real than the other.
The Secular and the Spiritual
Meng Chunsheng carries the secular self: identity as it is recognized by the social world, responsibility to others, the rules of the game as they actually exist, the reasonable accommodations that make life in community possible.
Chun Mengsheng carries the spiritual self: desire in its unfiltered form, dreams as they actually come, the life that exists beneath the social performance, the authentic impulses that social life requires be managed, suppressed, or transformed into acceptable expression.
Neither character is simply good. Meng Chunsheng's adherence to social rules is not mere conformity — it is the form that love and responsibility take in a social world. Chun Mengsheng's pursuit of desire and dream is not simple selfishness — it is the form that life and truth take when they are not managed by social necessity.
The contradiction between them is not a problem to be solved. It is the actual condition of being a person.
Role Performance Art
My Flesh establishes what Mu Yuming calls a new field: 角色行为艺术 — Role Performance Art.
This is distinct from conventional performance art, in which an artist performs actions, often as themselves or as an explicit persona, in a defined time and space. In role performance art, the characters persist beyond any single performance event. They exist in daily life — in social interactions, in text, in conversation, in the ongoing accumulation of lived experience that each character generates differently.
Meng Chunsheng and Chun Mengsheng are not masks that Mu Yuming puts on and takes off. They are orientations — different ways of moving through the same world, different ways of registering what the world contains, different ways of responding to what arrives. The artistic investigation is not what happens in a performance event but what happens in the long-term inhabitation of these two positions, and in the friction between them.
《俺的肉》 — My Flesh — suggests that the site of this investigation is the body itself: the flesh that carries both persons, that is claimed by both, that can only be in one place at a time and yet must somehow contain them both.