Long Pan: Seeing the World from a Mushroom’s Perspective
Text / Yuan Xiao
NEW ART Bazaar Art 2024-06-26
“When I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree, all seem to gaze at me.”
“NATURE’S QUESTIONING”
-Thomas Hardy
Long Pan does not consider herself a professional artist. She habitually moves between artificial and natural environments, observing the chaotic external world from a novel, nonhuman perspective. Mycelium‑linked boats that head to sea and wind chimes made from metal‑enriched plants: intense sensorial impulses drive her artistic practice, underpinned by complex fieldwork and profound interdisciplinary inquiry.
At a time when environmental issues are increasingly salient, Long Pan detaches the individual, rejects centrism, and draws from multiple disciplines to develop new modes of creation—an undefinable, fluid artistic language that responds to her concerns about social evolution and humanity’s future.
“Mushrooms as a New Artistic Medium — Things Circulate and Ultimately Connect”
Long Pan’s childhood was spent in rural Jiangxi, where swarms of fireflies lit the nights, the Milky Way was visible overhead, and cows, frogs, alongside unseen ghosts or deities, surrounded her—human and nonhuman alike. Urbanization later disrupted these ties, and she experienced the city’s severing of connections as a form of isolation.
A graduate of the Cross‑Media Department at China Academy of Art, Long Pan naturally carries an intimacy with nature into her medium‑agnostic work. While studying in Hangzhou, pervasive dampness made mold that could not be fully cleaned from rooms—an unavoidable coexistence that opened a new world for her.
“Fungi of every kind thrive”—these organisms, white or green, smooth or furry, are ubiquitous and brimming with vitality and creativity. From culinary and medicinal uses to serving as a novel, more eco‑friendly foam substitute, fungi have a long history intertwined with human civilization.
As a new artistic medium, mushrooms—at once quotidian and uncanny—offer Long Pan a swift conduit to transmute social issues and lived realities into an artistic language. After the “C9 spill” pollution incident in Quangang, Quanzhou in 2018, she learned that some fungi tolerate seawater and can degrade crude oil, which sparked a powerful creative impulse.
A three‑hour bus ride, one hour by local transit, and a half‑hour walk are required to reach the polluted seascape. Its remoteness keeps most city dwellers indifferent; yet the sensory jolt of finding oil‑scented clams in a wet market immediately reconnects one to harbor contamination. Long Pan believes that all things circulate and ultimately relate. She sought a way to unravel complex relations and present them as knowable and perceptible. For the work Wonderland Intersection, she drew inspiration from fishermen’s ferry boats—rectangular skiffs used to transit from shallow inland waters to deeper seas. Using a similarly shaped floating board as a nutrient substrate, she allowed fungal cultures to grow freely: white mycelium entwined with the nutrient board to become a mushroom boat.
In the video, an old man in a straw hat rows the tiny vessel across a calm green sea toward a distant petrochemical park dominated by massive oil tanks. She attempts to counter the polluted ocean with the degrading capacity and regenerative life force of an ostensibly insignificant mushroom boat. The stark contrast between enormity and smallness, weight and lightness, erupts into intense feeling within an apparently poetic tableau.
“Mushrooms Carry Integrative, Emergent Vitality — Growing from Within like Mycelium, Continuously Reaching Outward”
“Mushrooms have their own world,” Long Pan says with conviction and casualness, as if remarking on a fine day. These tiny, seemingly pluckable and discardable lifeforms, in her eyes, hold immense energy.
She cultivates mushrooms in varied sites: sealed metal boxes, curtains at windowsills… Mushrooms forgotten on a windowsill retract from their plump fruiting bodies into mycelial threads to pierce textile barriers. The fine filaments pass through fabric gaps, grow to the far side of the obstruction, and reconverge into an indistinct whole.
Humans typically confront obstacles by circumventing or destroying them. Mushrooms, however, fuse and aggregate with others in another mode of life, producing a novel state.
Long Pan places fungal cultures on books, tiles, bricks, stools, and diverse material substrates, letting mushrooms grow, entwine, and envelop, ultimately forming a new material she terms a “newly forged thing.”
In the work Flowing Bodies, Long Pan used 3D scanning to render her body’s contour as a growth base for mushrooms. The AI‑perfectly scanned body is gradually wrapped by mycelium; luxuriant mycelium then condenses into the mushroom’s own body. The human–nonhuman assemblage creates a new field that transcends temporal and spatial dimensions, prompting endless associations among technology, nature, and multi‑species cohabitation.
From a mushroom’s vantage, tiny mycelial threads connect trees, soil, minerals, and local residents—and via technology, thread into a wider world.
Through artistic practice, Long Pan attends to the natural environment and marginalized communities, growing from within like mycelium and continually reaching outward.
“Towing Weighty Reality with Lightness — Standing amid Chaotic Sites, Expressing the Worlds She Cares For”
Long Pan’s Wind Chime originates from concern over electronic waste and the associated heavy‑metal pollution. Acquiring key information across disciplinary boundaries and consulting specialists became part of her process.
Following expert advice, she selected plants that accumulate heavy metals. By phytometallurgical means she extracted copper from them to craft a wind chime. Hung high on a branch, the bell rings “ding ding,” resonating with rustling wild grass; the wind sweeps across metal‑enriched soil. Plants may die, but the metals they contain persist generation after generation.
Rather than perform pain to narrate pain, Long Pan seeks to tug at weighty realities with a lighter touch. The sensorial impetus that drives her art is supported by meticulous fieldwork and deep interdisciplinary study. She resists compartmentalizing her practice under art, anthropology, or sociology; she prefers to operate as an artist who roams among disciplines, exchanging with scientific professionals, acquiring the technical training and knowledge necessary for creation.
Simultaneously, she acts as an instigator, pulling researchers’ gaze out from cell walls to see climate, forests, minerals, and villagers’ attachment to plants. Taking a step back to perceive the relations among these elements opens more possibilities.
In this process, Long Pan has joined scientific expeditions into Shangri‑La to search for plants, anchored in desolate places, flagged down Tibetan drivers in shabby cars to enter villagers’ private mountains for mushrooms, and brushed shoulders with strangers on pre‑dawn harbor embankments—moments steeped in mutual fear of unknown dangers.
Led by instinct to seek the new, she has traversed selenium mines in Yichun and Bolivia, rainforests in Yunnan and Colombia, and regions where both Tibetans and Oroqen revere mountain gods. Following her inner mycelium, she journeys ever farther.
“Attention to ecology is a visceral, flesh‑and‑blood issue, not merely an artistic context.” In 2023, having won the 2022 Mentorship Award “Cultural & Artistic Responses to Environmental Change” (a collaboration between the Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe‑Institut), Long Pan began a yearlong art project not aimed at production. Supported by four mentors, she undertook both physical and spiritual journeys with 12 artists from different countries who similarly care deeply about the environment.
Setting foot on South American soil, Long Pan felt the immediacy of artistic practice. Peruvian Amazonian artist Renzo Alva Hurtado focuses on oil and mining pollution; Indian artist Paribartana Mohanty examines environmental catastrophe in the Bay of Bengal—just as mining and logging severely damage Colombian rainforests and local livelihoods. These practices carry powerful drives: acts of resistance and attempts to address real problems.
Long Pan does not see herself as a professional artist; she simply chose artistic creation as a means to place herself in chaotic sites, to feel and be moved, and through continuous learning and self‑cultivation, to articulate the realities she cares about.
She has at times been criticized for political correctness due to her chosen focus, but attention itself bears meaning. Working within mobile environments, she responds to social evolution with different, new artistic languages.