The Full Essay
Chongren-Li'en's Academy Altar — Mu Yuming's First Solo Show at the Oslo National Academy (1996)
In October 1996, the Naxi artist Mu Yuming from Yunnan, China, while studying at the Oslo National Academy of Fine Arts (Statens Kunstakademi i Oslo), held his first solo exhibition at the Soria Moria Cultural Castle (Soria Moria Kulturslott) during the “Films from the South” festival (Film fra Sør). This was the artist's first formal utterance after entering the Nordic academy system, and a crucial juncture at which, in his identity as a descendant of Chongren-Li'en, he implanted the ethnic creation memory into a contemporary context.
The exhibition's theme, “the meaning lies within the meaningless” (“meningen ligger i det uten mening”), in a paradoxical Norwegian formulation, declared a stranger's identity strategy within the academy system — he was neither a docile international student nor an exotic ornament, but, with the shamanic eye of an ancestor crossing chaos, sublimated his personal migration into a contemporary re-enactment of civilizational creation.
The paintings and installation works on view are the raw archive of the threefold shock — cultural, psychological, physiological — that Mu Yuming underwent after arriving in Northern Europe from the Yunnan plateau. The tearing and suspension of limbs in the pictures, the sacred superimposition of candle-arrays and floating hands, the unnamed incantation within the X-equation, can all find their prototypes in the creation narrative of the “Chongbantu”: Chongren-Li'en fell from the ninth heaven to the white earth, language broke, the land and climate were strange, the body refused to adapt to the new gravity — a thousand years later, his descendant, in the winter nights of Oslo, with the canvas as altar, re-enacted the birth-pangs of this second creation.
Choosing “Films from the South” as the context of the first show is itself deeply meaningful. The festival focused on non-Western moving images, while Mu Yuming intervened in the silent form of painting and installation, forming a reverse interrogation of the “South” discourse — he refused to be incorporated into the comfortable frame of “multiculturalism,” and instead, with a Chongren-Li'en-style primal violence, threw the tearing sense of civilizational collision directly at the audience.
This exhibition constitutes a foundational coordinate of Mu Yuming's artistic career: from the chaotic birth-pangs of the first academy show, to the later dissolution of identity in “Donating the Self,” the bodily limits of the “Three Years Retreat,” and the global nomadism of the “20 Days” projects — he has always continued the ancestor's trajectory: rebuilding within rupture, naming within the nameless, illuminating, with a shamanic body, the meaning within the meaningless. The basement exhibition hall of Soria Moria thereby became the first white-earth altar of Chongren-Li'en after his crossing of chaos.