About the Series · 365 Degrees
365 Degrees
From the Mimetic Anxiety of “Delft Blue” to the Tactile Rebirth of “365 Degrees”
(2006, the Netherlands)
After the extreme expenditure of “20 Days,” the artist returned to Amsterdam and, blindfolded with black cloth, carried out a suspension of vision, entering the bodily subject of a phenomenology of touch. In one month he completed 365 pieces of clay. Nietzsche's “will to power” was reversed into a will to self-preservation, recovered inward, completing a redistribution of energy in the cooling of the clay. Zhuangzi's “the form has something it forgets” attained, in blindfolded blind work, the state of the true person who “meets by spirit rather than sees by eye.” The Dongba “substitute” (“na”) lies deeply hidden within: 365 pieces of clay take on the trauma as material substitutes, letting the true body be reborn from the ashes, constituting a civilisational retelling of the Jingdezhen–Delft ceramic route.
Full Essay
365 Degrees
From the Mimetic Anxiety of “Delft Blue” to the Tactile Rebirth of “365 Degrees”
(2006, the Netherlands)
In 2006, Mu Yuming was in a period of violent dissipation in his artistic career. The “20 Days” series took the body as a conceptual medium through extreme survival; “Lijiang Studio” constructed a space outside the system; the “Jianghu” movement challenged the mechanism in a guerrilla posture. This high-intensity practice constituted an extremisation of Foucault's “technologies of the self” — the artist forged himself into a tool, and came close to breaking. “365 Degrees” is the repair ritual after the break: a return to the Amsterdam studio, a withdrawal from the public realm into private space, constituting the negation of the negation of artistic production.
The artist blindfolded himself with black cloth, carrying out a suspension of vision. Husserl used suspension to return consciousness to the transcendental subject; Mu Yuming used black cloth to return the body to the tactile subject. Merleau-Ponty's “double sensation” is here made flesh: the fingers sink into the clay, at once subject shaping object and object shaping subject in return. The daily-exercise production of 365 works constitutes a critical reversal of Benjamin's “age of mechanical reproduction” — not a technological disenchantment, but a re-enchantment of the body.
Nietzsche's “will to power” is here reversed: not expanding outward, but recovering inward, the 365 pieces of clay constituting a system for storing energy. Zhuangzi's “the form has something it forgets” answers to the blindfold — “meeting by spirit rather than seeing by eye,” advancing from “skill” to “the Way.” The Dongba “substitute” (“na”) lies deeply hidden within: the 365 pieces of clay take on the trauma, letting the true body be reborn from the ashes.
The globalising trajectory of ceramics constitutes an implicit theoretical layer: from Jingdezhen by way of the maritime Silk Road to Delft in the Netherlands, forming Europe's feverish imitation of Chinese porcelain and giving rise to “Delft blue” — imitating Chinese blue-and-white with blue glaze, yet never able to reach the essence of porcelain. This is a civilisational mimetic anxiety. Mu Yuming, as a Chinese artist, carried out self-healing in the Netherlands with clay, completing a civilisational retelling: not a copy, but a reactivation of this cross-cultural material through personal trauma and repair. The work migrated from the studio to the courtyard, completing the civilisational cycle from the mimetic anxiety of “Delft blue” to tactile rebirth.