About the Series · Hiscox Art Award Selection Exhibition
20 Days · Hiscox Art Award Selection Exhibition
2006, Amsterdam. The exhibition showed the entire material remainder of the “20 Days” extreme project — painting, video, installation, sculpture and ceramics — juxtaposed with “Lijiang Studio” and “Jianghu.” This was a Quixotic setting-forth, and more than that the incarnation of Nietzsche's “will to power”: the artist took the extreme conditions of no funding, no premise and no network as his proving ground, revaluing values in the posture of the “overman.” The black-and-white images are not trauma but a vow to actively choose one's fate within “eternal recurrence”; the confrontation with consumer signs is the practice of “revaluing values.” This is also Zhuangzi's “free and easy wandering” — depending on nothing outside, reaching “the land of nothing whatsoever” through “the use of the useless.” Chongren Li'en's will to create the world resonates with Nietzsche's Dionysus and Zhuangzi's pipes of heaven: the hero is not conquering the world, but dancing with the void in the world's fissures.
Full Essay
20 Days · Hiscox Art Award Selection Exhibition: The Will to Power and Free and Easy Wandering
February 2006, Amsterdam. Mu Yuming entered the Hiscox Art Award with the core work of his period of study at the Rijksakademie. The exhibition showed the entire material remainder produced by the “20 Days” extreme project in Kunming, France, New Zealand and the Netherlands: painting, video, installation, sculpture and ceramics, juxtaposed with “Lijiang Studio” and “Jianghu,” opening a philosophical dialogue between Nietzsche's “will to power” and Zhuangzi's “free and easy wandering.”
Nietzsche's Will to Power: The Overman as Self-Legislator
“20 Days” is Nietzsche's philosophy made flesh: carrying no funds, knowing no one, completing work within twenty days in a foreign country. The artist actively dismantled the social value system — nationality, language, economy, human relations — and this is not enforced poverty but the radical practice of “revaluing all values.” Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” and humanity must become its own legislator; the extreme condition is precisely the artistic execution of that declaration: when external authority is suspended, the artist creates value with naked will.
The black-and-white images are not trauma but the visualisation of the “will to power” — not fear of the world, but possession and shaping of it. The poverty actively chosen by the artist under extreme conditions is an embodiment of master morality: not “suffering because one does not have,” but “able to create even without, because one has chosen.” The saturated colour blocks are the burning of the Dionysian spirit — reveling in chaos, creating in destruction, embracing each repetition of the extreme through “eternal recurrence.”
The “365” ceramic marker string takes 365 fragile ceramic pieces as markers of time; their fragility is not a lament of frailty but material evidence of amor fati: Nietzsche demands that one not only bear one's fate but love it. Every crack is an active affirmation, every repetition a self-reinforcement of the will to power. The use of consumer packaging and discarded material is a head-on encounter with the society of the “last man” — the juxtaposition of commercial slogans and abstract brushwork constitutes a refusal of the mediocre, calculable life of the last man.
Zhuangzi's Free and Easy Wandering: The Pipes of Heaven, Depending on Nothing Outside
If Nietzsche's will to power goes to its extreme, it degenerates into conquest. Zhuangzi's “free and easy wandering” offers balance and transcendence. The state of “20 Days” — no funding, no premise, no network — is not only Nietzschean self-legislation but the practice of Zhuangzi's “depending on nothing”: “riding the true course of heaven and earth, driving the changes of the six vapours, to wander in the infinite.” The artist stripped away every social dependence, not in order to conquer the world, but in order to reach “the land of nothing whatsoever.”
The “useless tree,” because it has no use, is able to live out its natural years. The “poor materials” in the exhibition — consumer packaging, discarded things — are precisely the contemporary transformation of “the use of the useless”: in the capital system they are abandoned surplus; in the artist's hands they become the vehicle of the “pipes of heaven.” The scaffolding is not a tool of conquest but the free play of the blade in “Cook Ding cutting up an ox,” “entering the gap with what has no thickness” — wandering freely in structural fissures, not resisting with force but wandering with wisdom.
“Lijiang Studio” presents the turn from “will to power” toward “free and easy wandering.” Nietzsche's overman is a solitary legislator; Zhuangzi's true person is a co-being who “wanders with the maker of things.” The participatory art represented by “Farmer Station” is not the imposition of will upon villagers but the practice of “equalising things” — “heaven and earth are born together with me, and the myriad things and I are one.” The collision of Western academy training with Chinese rural reality is not the trauma of cultural dislocation but a fusion of horizons in the manner of “the debate on the bridge over the Hao.”
Chongren Li'en: A Naxi Harmony of Dionysus and the Pipes of Heaven
Chongren Li'en, in the Naxi creation epic Chongbantu, is the hidden harmony of Nietzsche and Zhuangzi. He passed through the flood, the trials of the heavenly realm and the obstruction of demons, rebuilding the order of the human world with will and ingenuity — this is Nietzschean will to power; but his motive in crossing the flood was not to conquer the heavenly realm but to rebuild harmony in the human world — this is Zhuangzi's “responding to emperors and kings.” Chongren Li'en's “sacrifice” is not passive endurance but active “dependence on nothing” — not relying on the grace of the gods, but completing creation by his own will.
The traces of the body — blurred human forms, contorted limbs — are the body torn apart and recomposed by Dionysus in revelry, and also Zhuangzi's free and easy body in which “the form has something it forgets.” In the Naxi “substitute” ritual, the subject exchanges active dissolution for the renewal of the world; this is precisely the meeting point of Nietzsche's “overman” and Zhuangzi's “true person”: not opposing the world with rigid self-preservation, but merging into the world's flow through supple self-transformation.
The Exhibition as Philosophical Theatre: From Hero to True Person
2006 fell in the middle period of “Lijiang Studio's” operation, and the artist took the “archive of heroism” as a strategy, juxtaposing global expedition with local rootedness. The subsequent extension is the continuing unfolding of the dialogue between Nietzsche and Zhuangzi: closing Lijiang Studio in 2009 is a turn from the expansion of “will to power” to the contraction of “free and easy wandering”; the wandering of “donating the self” in 2011–2012 is the utmost practice of “the use of the useless”; taking monastic vows in Myanmar in 2013 is the purification of the will of the “true person”; the three-year retreat of 2014–2017 is the ultimate cultivation of the “fasting of the mind.”
The exhibition asks: when the subject is stripped of every social attribute and faces the “other” naked, does the “self” still possess reality? Nietzsche's answer is: the self is the eternal creation of the will to power; Zhuangzi's answer is: the self is the resonance of the pipes of heaven after “I have lost myself”; Chongren Li'en's answer is: the self is the fire of creation, dancing with the void and singing with the world in the cycle of destruction and rebuilding.
The end of the extreme is not victory but dance; the end of heroism is not the throne but jianghu.