“Silence is not absence. It is a very different kind of presence.”
The Proposition
From 2013 to 2022, Mu Yuming observed ten years of deliberate public silence — and in doing so, completed a large-scale life performance artwork.
The terms of the silence were precise: no publications in the name of art. No gallery exhibitions. No participation in commercial or institutional art activities of any kind. For ten years, the public record of Mu Yuming as an artist went dark.
This was not retirement. It was creation — of a different and more demanding kind. The silence was the work. Its shape was defined by everything it excluded: all the normal activities through which artists in the contemporary art world make themselves legible, maintain their careers, and demonstrate their continued relevance. By refusing all of this for ten years, Mu Yuming was asking what remained when it was stripped away — what was underneath the institutional performance of being an artist.
What Happened Inside the Silence
The silence was not empty. Ten years of extraordinary activity took place within it — none of it conducted in the name of art.
In 2013, Mu Yuming became a monk in Myanmar — entering a monastery, observing monastic discipline, and participating in public welfare work for orphans in the region. The same year, invited to the 23rd Hungary MEDIAWAVE Light & Shadow Music Festival, he produced on-site works that were subsequently collected by the institution — work made in the spirit of the silence, not as art-world event but as genuine creative engagement.
In 2014, at the COART Asia Youth Art Festival in Shuhe, Lijiang, he created 《桥》 — Bridge — an installation using nails, exploring connection, estrangement, and symbiosis.
In 2017, he initiated a three-year seclusion: a period of private retreat, self-cultivation, and artistic precipitation in silence. Within this seclusion — simultaneously, paradoxically — he implemented the ChuangTzu Project (2017–2019) in Bajie, Anning: a large-scale rural art community that covered an entire village with its activities. The seclusion was inner; the ChuangTzu Project was the form that creative energy took in the world while the inner work continued.
In 2021–2022, within the final phase of the silence, he implemented 《寻找灵魂伴侣》 — Searching for a Soulmate — a performance of real social interaction and soul dialogue.
Completion
Ten Years of Silence was completed in 2022.
Its completion was not announced with an exhibition or a publication. The work completed itself in time — as a duration does, not as an event does. What marked its completion was the resumption of public activity: the launch of Five Hundred Arhats (2022), the OUR CHILDREN project in Chiang Mai (2023), the She Nian Fo project at Pa Pae (2024–2025).
The silence produced the ChuangTzu Project and its rural community. It produced three years of private seclusion and the spiritual development that took place within them. It produced the works made at MEDIAWAVE and COART. It produced, in the strictest sense, nothing — no object, no document, no institutional record — and in that nothing, it produced a kind of clarity that the busy years before had not permitted.
The artists who re-emerged at the end of the silence — the Lao Mu who launched Five Hundred Arhats, the Hei Qiu'en who went to Chiang Mai — were not the same person who had entered it. The silence had done its work.