The Full Essay
Project Essay
In 2014, his mother was diagnosed with cancer; doctors pronounced a survival span of twenty days. The artist Mu Yuming (Lao Mu) flew from a Beijing exhibition preparation site back to Kunming, beginning a three-year experiment with life. From then on, “Lao Mu” and “Meng Chunsheng” split into two co-existing selves: Lao Mu stayed in Kunming, daily pushing a small bicycle to the vegetable market, buying food and cooking for his parents, three hours a day of end-of-life comfort and spiritual counseling; Meng Chunsheng, in a ceramic workshop offered by a friend in Jingdezhen, continued the “My Flesh” social-sculpture project, preparing for the Beijing exhibition, and ultimately abandoned the base entirely in order to better care for his parents.
This split references Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical four-fold body: Lao Mu anchors the Physical Body and Etheric Body, bearing the weight of care; Meng Chunsheng is active in the Astral Body and the Ego, continuing the lightness of art. It also echoes Carl Gustav Jung's process of Individuation: Lao Mu as Persona, Meng Chunsheng as Shadow, the two in continuous dialogue, conflict, and integration over three years. The absence of his three older sisters constitutes a collective projection of the shadow — their “something came up, can't come” tears apart the totalization of family ethics, forcing Lao Mu to bear all responsibility alone.
“Three Years Retreat” references the Tibetan Buddhist “three years, three months” retreat (sgrub khang) tradition, but undertakes a fundamentally secular translation. No mountain cave, no master, no retreat-guardian — the vegetable market is the retreat hall, the bicycle is the dharma instrument, cancer is the koan, the absent family is the dharma protector. Specifically designed as: Year One, abstinence, refining essence into vital breath, disciplining the body; Year Two, encountering different women while sitting unmoved, refining vital breath into spirit, testing the heart; Year Three, “fighting poison with poison” — seeking a partner with the other's consent, maintaining awareness at the height of desire, refining spirit and returning to emptiness, the matter at hand being the truth itself.
This practice tacitly corresponds with the dialectic of Daoist inner-alchemy in Zhang Boduan's Wuzhen Pian — “beginning with action, people struggle to find it; only upon reaching non-action does the multitude begin to know” — and is also an extreme test of Emmanuel Lévinas's ethics of the face: in intimate relations, can the face (visage) of the Other still pierce through pleasure and issue the ethical command “thou shalt not kill”? In the third year, the female partner's face is at once the nakedness (nudité) of the absolute Other (Autrui) and the object of desire; Lao Mu's “sitting unmoved” is not restraint in the absence of desire, but maintaining the openness of the “Saying” (le Dire) at the height of desire, refusing to let the partner's face degenerate into the possessed “Said” (le Dit).
The result: carried to hospital by ambulance, wheelchair-bound for half a year. Within Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technology, the bicycle is the ethicization of tertiary retention (rétention tertiaire) — carrying the three-year routes, rhythms, and weights (the groceries bought, the mother's needs); each pedal-stroke is a deferred writing-out of the “twenty-day” sentence. The wheelchair, in turn, is the toxic transformation of the “remedy” (pharmakon): as poison, it strips away mobility and interrupts the daily ethical cycle of the vegetable market, causing the body to atrophy; as cure, it forces primary retention (perception) to extreme acuity, compelling the wheelchair-bound body to relearn space, time, and relations. From “bicycle-mobility-care” to “wheelchair-stillness-inner observation”, and onward to the future “tea-dāna-public tea gathering-social care”, this constitutes the continuous evolution and reprogramming of the prosthesis (prothèse) relationship.
Within Gilles Deleuze's theory of the fold, Lao Mu and Meng Chunsheng are two sides of the same fold (pli) — the inner/outer folding of Kunming/Jingdezhen, the continuous weaving of abstinence/fighting-poison-with-poison. The mother's face is the un-foldable fold (pli infranchissable) — around this ethical singularity (singularité) all other folds rotate. Martin Heidegger's “Being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode) is here revised as “Being-toward-the-Other's-death, while simultaneously Being-toward-one's-own-death”: the daily three hours of comforting his mother is Being-toward-the-Other's-death; the half-year of wheelchair-bound confrontation with his own collapse is Being-toward-one's-own-death.
Three Years Retreat is not world-renouncing practice but a deeper entry into life. It proves: the highest practice is not in the mountain cave but in becoming the recipient of the face, the carrier of the fold, the operator of the prosthesis — responding to the face's call within the clamor of the vegetable market, reprogramming retention within the stillness of the wheelchair, folding infinite time within the “twenty-day” sentence.
Artist's Note
Note: This group of works ended with the artist being taken to hospital by ambulance, wheelchair-bound for half a year. The little vegetable-market bicycle is the entire instrument of dharma and the third retention.