20 Days Project
《二十天计划》 · Kunming — Oslo — Amsterdam — Brittany, France
“Twenty countries in twenty days — not with a passport, but with a body.”
The Concept
In 2003, at the Kunming Creative Warehouse (创库) — one of the most important gathering points for Chinese experimental art at the time — Mu Yuming spent twenty consecutive days in uninterrupted on-site creation.
The core concept was stark: 20 Days, 20 Countries. Each of the twenty days was assigned to a different country. Each day, Mu translated that country's cultural core into physical form — through body, local materials, action, and duration — without recourse to its flag, its landmarks, its national symbols, or any of the representational shortcuts that pass for cultural understanding. Nothing was preset. No outcome was determined in advance.
The question the project posed was both simple and almost impossible: can a single body, in a single space, encounter a culture — not its image, but something of its actual texture? And if it can, what does that encounter produce?
Kunming Creative Warehouse
The Kunming Creative Warehouse was not a neutral space. Established in the late 1990s as an independent cultural hub in Yunnan, it gathered painters, sculptors, performance artists, filmmakers, and critics around a shared conviction: that meaningful art was being made outside the institutions, in the actual lived conditions of a changing China.
To stage 20 Days there was a deliberate choice. The work was not made for a white cube, for a biennale catalogue, or for an institutional audience. It was made in a functioning artistic community — in front of peers who were themselves experimenting, failing, and starting again.
The materials Mu Yuming used were those at hand: objects found in and around the warehouse, the bodies of participants and observers who came and went over the twenty days, the architecture of the space itself. Each day's country left its trace — material, gestural, photographic — before the next began.
Oslo and Binic
The work did not stay in Kunming. In 2004, 20 Days toured to Oslo, Norway — Mu Yuming's second home, the city where he had trained, the city that had given him the experimental art education that made the project possible. In 2005, it moved again, to Binic, France.
Each tour was a different encounter with the same core questions. The materials changed; the bodies changed; the spaces changed. The concept held. Twenty countries, twenty days — carried, now, to three countries and three entirely different cultural contexts.