Long Pan:
Illuminating the Realm of Being in All Things
Text / Jenny Xu
Supported by CEF Experimental Film & Image Center
In a ravaged forest in Oregon, United States—devastated by overlogging—an unexpected abundance of matsutake mushrooms has emerged, a species that cannot thrive under standard cultivation conditions. In The Matsutake at the End of the World, a group of marginal figures who cannot adapt to capitalist regimes of production take root here as professional matsutake pickers. This barren woodland becomes for them a utopia outside the frameworks of mainstream society.
Far away in Longhua Park, Shenzhen, China, there is likewise a community of itinerant workers who refuse to be long-term laborers. They observe a “work one, rest three” principle and hide within the park’s green lungs, inside the talent market’s sphere of influence. Long Pan invited several of these migrant youths to cultivate mushrooms in Longhua Park because she felt they resembled mushrooms—living withdrawn from the world and resisting discipline. In The Pink Mushroom Banquet, under the cover of moonlight, the planting crew slips through shrub-formed natural screens, excitedly seeking concealed planting sites and using guerrilla tactics to evade daytime sanitation efforts. Many members of the crew come from farming families; their fluency in sowing fungi seems to trace back to childhood scenes. I imagine this experience may, however briefly, become a utopia in their lives of “exile.” A month later, gradients of orange-pink bloom wildly and gently, starkly contrasting with the park’s cultivated plantings. The color, detached from everyday reality, lends a dreamlike quality and casts a soft-filtered glow over the bustle of the adjacent Sanhe worker market.
“We chose pink mushrooms because the color resembles flesh, and the texture is similar,” Long Pan’s remark opened the hinterland of my reverie. Beyond the story, crew members return to precarious daily routines while the pink mushrooms enter the museum and are portioned under exquisitely curated presentation. In countless casual conversations in the film, they enumerate keywords—“Foxconn,” “Che Guevara imitators,” “account bans for asserting rights”—as readily as one would recite household items. The youths in Longhua Park largely migrated to the city to escape intergenerational fate; having seen through the selection logic of production systems, they become, willingly or not, “exiles,” staking their bodies and representing a negating dimension of resistance to instrumental rationality: knowing they are flesh, yet refusing to be slaughtered.
Like mushrooms, growth follows its own distinct logic. Long Pan says that mushrooms she cultivates in her studio always find accidental breaches in their containers and use these to “escape.” Even species prized by diners as delicacies often cannot adapt to artificial cultivation and must be located in the wild. Yet wild mushrooms in the park constantly face the risk of being cleared by maintenance; even prized matsutake suffer the emasculation of grading systems—they are plucked and served at banquets before their spore caps fully unfurl. In contrast, the crew’s self-exile under the encroaching shadow of systems resembles a time-pressured pursuit.
Most beings driven by life’s pressures, unless stripped of basic dignity and deprived of any respite, remain tightly dependent on systems of production. Indeed, out of the desire to survive, many tacitly consent to the expansion of those systems without foreseeing the calamities that follow. Long Pan’s recent fieldwork in Diqing revealed villagers who have venerated mountain gods for generations but leased those sacred mountains to mining companies. “The mountain god doesn’t understand contracts”—this rough, absurd self-persuasion hints at the first steps we take toward “civilization” before being alienated by production systems. Afterward, humanity’s farce and nature’s mute drama play out simultaneously. Guiyu in Wind Chimes is a single example among countless similar stages.
Once a barren remote land, Guiyu prospered and produced many millionaires through the acquisition of electronic waste and the smelting of precious metals, fulfilling a modernizing dream for that territory. Copper once carried countless desires and hopes; poured out with wastewater again and again, it settled in the mud, clung to plant roots, flowed through branches and leaf veins, and even seeped into blood and hair. The earth remains silent, but Long Pan forges from flora and wood the hermetic utterances condensed by deep time, casting them into copper bells. When a clear chime pierces the silence, this mute drama beneath the mundane world has reached its denouement. Humanity has indulged too long in its radical scripts and, belatedly aware, resembles ephemeral fungi ignorant of lunar cycles. Lurking in contaminated sediments and water no longer safe to drink are what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—vast, distributed ecological disaster entities that exceed human perceptual scale. They are mysterious, complex, irreducible, and poised to ignite. The sound of the wind chime is the low moan of these invisible leviathans traversing space and time.
Also prostrate in the world is the colossal beast of industrial Cthulhu, whose tentacles are intricate and unmanageable: tug at one and the whole trembles. In The Wonderland Intersection, an entire petrochemical park falls into disorder over the aging of a single hose. Nearly 70 tons of corrosive C9 leaked into the sea, bringing local fisheries to a near halt. Learning that fungal mycelia can secrete enzymes that degrade hydrocarbons in crude oil, Long Pan made a mycological boat and had fishermen carry it into polluted waters. Each mushroom bore the villagers’ hopes of rebuilding their homes, yet when faced with massive chemical effluents they proved as powerless as eggs against stone. At the film’s end, as the camera pulls back, the lone boat becomes a speck drifting on the vast water before sliding toward the industrial zone’s abyssal maw.
If we pull the lens farther still, the factory complex too will turn to dust on the blue planet and vanish into nothingness. Bioremediation is slow, yet mycelia already pervade subterranean spaces and weave vast networks. One day these organisms will consume the waste of industrial systems. Perhaps then wind chimes will still tremble in fields, recounting that frantic epoch of gold‑digging—but will humanity still exist? The geological scars carved by avarice will eventually be smoothed by time and become the planet’s distinctive, delicate skin texture—an imprint of long epochs for the Earth, and for us the only evidence that we once existed.
Heaven and earth regard all things as straw dogs; just as metals indiscriminately flow through plant tissues and human bodies, mycelia will decompose natural and synthetic matter alike. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, the forest god’s passing brings flourishing growth, yet its exhalation can bring death. In natural systems, human pursuit of development inevitably enlarges civilizational frameworks, and the two will interweave and mirror each other, sometimes colliding. Long Pan is not a romantic naturist, yet she insists that humanity must stand with all beings, because “we are both co‑influencers and co‑sufferers of the system, like mushrooms.”
“Wonderland Intersection” is taken from the name of a local bus stop; amid the encroachment of refineries and chemical plants it seems incongruous, aptly metaphorizing the state of the fishermen who push out to sea—if every visible direction leads only to industrial claws, the boat bearing hope floats aimlessly, resembling the “unhomely” condition Heidegger warned of. Heidegger used Gestell to describe the essence of technology: through coercive compulsion, nature is predetermined as material for arbitrary arrangement. In this process, all beings are demoted to mere stock, humans included. Yet just as mycelia always find escape routes outside disciplinary systems, when the emergent logics of nature are ignored, runaway feedback will eventually pierce systemic fissures. “The real threat is not crude oil or metal, but industrial machinery — the mindset of this system,” Long Pan says.
Pushing out to sea with no bearings is nevertheless a decisive moment in which people hurl themselves back toward the question of existence. When the predicament of dwelling is reevaluated and the tyranny of technology exposed, forgotten relationalties of being will be revealed. Long Pan says: “In this digital age where the virtual receives excessive attention, the longer we inhabit the cloud, the more interested I become in material things like soil, because anything virtual ultimately needs material to be carried.” Returning to the land, she closely observes the real, thereby capturing intimations of humanity’s condition. In the three video works exhibited at CEF, we can hear copper’s elegy for industrial rise and fall, and see how mushrooms serve as metaphors for human predicaments. To apprehend the languages of all things and the burdens they bear for humanity is to more faithfully reflect ourselves and to shed light on humanity’s future.