Wu Wei Marketing
There was a moment in October when I looked at the plans I had written for myself (the “content calendar,” the collaboration sprints, the ten evergreen posts) and felt a quiet revolt rising inside me.
If I followed those plans, I would become a marketer. Not an artist.
I would be performing productivity rather than presence, and in doing so, would slowly lose the strange current that animates my practice: that sense of being in conversation with something larger, slower, and not entirely knowable.
And so, almost by accident, Wu Wei Marketing began.
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The Origin
Wu wei (無為) means “non-doing,” though not in the lazy sense. It means doing without forcing, acting without grasping. The river still moves; it simply doesn’t shove the water downstream.
Applied to art, it became my way to keep my creative headspace intact.
Marketing, I realized, can easily become a weed that overruns the garden, drinking all the water, shadowing every tender sprout.
So my practice had to remain the soil. The marketing, if it was to exist at all, had to be part of the ecology, not a factory built on top of it.
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The Principles
1. Protect Creative Energy
If marketing consumes the same fuel that powers the art, the whole thing collapses. My first rule is simple: the practice comes first.
Blog rhythm, newsletter, small updates. All of it bends around the actual work. When I’m sick, or underwater, the garden simply waits.
And somehow, it grows anyway.
2. Organic Over Aggressive
This is not hustle culture. I let the audience discover the work through time, through search, through whispers and shares.
Slow traffic is still movement. I’ve learned that a single genuine visit, someone who stays long enough to feel something, is worth more than a hundred algorithmic ghosts.
3. Mystery Over Transparency
There’s a strange violence in showing too much. The art begins to flatten when it’s over-explained.
“Where is the mystery after that?” I asked once, staring at the ceiling. Which, ironically, is what actual creativity often looks like.
So I share selectively. A glimpse, not a process. A finished image, not the labour behind it. The unknowable remains part of the spell.
4. Alignment Over Strategy
Everything that has worked in my life has happened naturally, almost accidentally.
“Everything has happened quite naturally and this practice has almost developed itself,” I wrote. So the only real strategy is to stay aligned: to follow what feels alive rather than what looks efficient.
It also protects my right to be human: some days are better than others.
5. Foundation Matters
George Eastman once said, “A business will be a permanent one if it is built on a sure foundation - good goods.”
So I focus on the work: making it honest, compelling, technically excellent. If the art has gravity, it will draw its own orbit.
6. Patience Over Panic
Traffic grows month by month. Small numbers, but alive.
October: 115 visitors. Then 133. Then 142.
Across countries around the globe: the U.S., Italy, Brazil, China.
I don’t fully know why. That’s the beauty of it. The current moves even when I am still.
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The Evidence
No ads.
No paid campaigns.
No videos showing process, no networking events, no algorithmic dance.
And yet: people come. They stay. They read.
Visitors view three or more pages per visit: often the Collector’s page, the Blog, the Art page. They linger, like guests in a gallery they didn’t know they’d find. Buenos Aires/São Paulo/Galveston are checking me out.
There’s a kind of grace in that: “My work makes waves even when I’m underwater.”
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Why It Works
Because it fits my body.
Because it fits my mind.
I live with fluctuations: depression and waves of energy that come and go.
Traditional marketing demands heroic consistency. Wu Wei asks only presence.
The practice continues even in the dark. The soil rests, but doesn’t die.
It also fits the philosophy of exile that defines Maa Kuu. This is marketing for those outside the institution, beyond the algorithmic kingdom. A quiet cultivation. A queer ecology of attention.
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Gardening the Practice
Wu Wei marketing is gardening, tending a multiplicity of small plots instead of building a single, exhausting monoculture.
There’s the art, the blog, the newsletter, the occasional print release.
Each one grows at its own rhythm. Some seasons are fertile; others are drought.
No fertilizer. No chemicals. Just time, sunlight, and quiet persistence.
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The Liberation Structure
In the end, Wu Wei marketing isn’t really about marketing.
It’s a liberation structure: a way to live and work meaningfully inside the constraints of capitalism, illness, and exile.
It asks: what if success isn’t about acceleration, but continuation?
What if sustainability is the highest form of resistance?
My work continues. It compounds, quietly, like interest in a savings account the banks forgot existed.
Each post, each image, each small connection are roots deepening underground, unseen but alive.
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The Core Insight
“Practice is sustainable because it doesn’t require constant heroic effort.”
That’s the truth of it.
The current carries me even when I’m still.
The garden grows while I sleep.
And in a world addicted to motion, that is its own quiet rebellion.
This is what I understand so far, five months into the experiment. The principles are emerging through practice, not imposed from theory. I'm learning wu wei marketing by doing it, and the doing continues to teach.
