Mushrooms as Method:
Ecological Art Practices by a New Generation of Chinese Artists
Interview and text / Yang Yao
"Mushrooms as Method: Ecological Art Practices by a New Generation of Chinese Artists
2022-12-04
Sustained summer heat, rampant viruses, energy shortages... ecological crises have long penetrated many facets of daily life. "This kind of crisis stems from an imbalance in our relationship with other life forms and material forms in nature, and solving it requires intimate cooperation between humans and other life forms." As artist Zheng Bo has said, when art encounters suspension in reality and amid various urgent and "uncontrollable" conditions, a new generation of creators has begun to shift attention away from human society and the self toward fungi, plants, animals, and the broader ecological environment and cosmic civilization—perceiving cross-species connections bodily and attempting to coexist with difference, complexity, and diversity.
The exhibition "The Language of Mushrooms: Networks of Interconnection" brings together several new-generation Chinese artists focused on ecological art. Most have interdisciplinary knowledge backgrounds and practice ecological art from integrated perspectives of ecology, biology, geology, sociology, and art history. They actively communicate and collaborate with experts in other disciplines and enter the creative process through fieldwork and hands-on experimentation. Their artworks and media show nontraditional diversity, generating and presenting collaborative processes with nature through sculpture, installation, sound, video, performance, and archival formats. In their works they attempt to construct an integrated consciousness of a living community that includes humans and nature—fungi, plants, and animals—prompting reflection on the interconnection and mutual influence of all things.
At the opening exhibition's first season of "Mushroom Talks," titled "Fieldwork, Fungi, and Art That Connects with Nature: Lessons Beyond the Anthropocene," curator Ye Ying said, "Existing humanistic knowledge structures are insufficient for us to re-understand the world's changes. Starting from a single species is the beginning of expanding our cognitive framework." "The Language of Mushrooms" gathers 34 groups of participants—artists, writers, photographers, and mycologists—with diverse knowledge backgrounds; we regard it as the generative process of a new "mycelial network."
The new generation of artists concerned with ecological issues often possesses multiple knowledge structures and conducts more fieldwork and interdisciplinary research during creation. Zheng Bo studied computer science and art theory; Cheng Xinhao switched to art after completing a PhD in chemistry; Cao Shuyi's education combines law, public administration, and fine art; Wang Yiyi studied nutrition and art. Their integrative knowledge structures and research perspectives greatly expand the field of visual arts.
These artists attempt to enter the frontier zones of natural science research to initiate dialogue and collaboration. Zheng Bo delves into plant life at the molecular level. His video work The Political Life of Plants is based on dialogues he held in the ancient beech forests of Brandenburg with Roosa Laitinen, a biologist studying plant adaptation, and Matthias Rillig, a plant ecologist who studies biodiversity and soil ecology. Cao Shuyi's exhibited work is based on recent mycological research in Yunnan into fungi that can degrade plastics and rubber, developed in collaboration with Peter Mortimer's lab at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Young artists commonly use field investigation methods. Long Pan created The Wonderland Crossing based on research into the 2018 nonane spill; this summer, she traveled to Shangri-La to observe how climate change and human activity affect the decline in matsutake yields. Wang Yiyi went to Lancang to search for the region's diverse species of cordyceps. Cheng Xinhao has long visited various places in Yunnan, grounding his work in anthropological and sociohistorical research.
In collaborations among nature, science, and art, they imagine forms of life and intelligence that cross boundaries.
Artist Long Pan noted similarities between fungi and socially marginalized groups. In her work focusing on the "Sanhe gods" (a small group of displaced people living in Sanhe who survive by doing day labor), Pink Mushroom Banquet, she engages fungi in the lives of these youths—collaborating with them to cultivate mushrooms and documenting their living conditions and candid thoughts. The piece originated from the artist's own resonance with "unseen" mushrooms and the similar survival conditions of the Sanhe gods and fungi: "They hide together in the grass, share a likeness of texture, and are groups unintentionally or intentionally ignored."
Long Pan began researching mushrooms and using them as an artistic material partly because she noticed fungi's remediation abilities—after seeing news of marine oil spills and finding in literature that fungi can degrade petroleum. Mushrooms appear ordinary, yet they can mend old objects and purify environments. In Wonderland Crossing, a work arising from the social pollution incident—the 2018 nonane leak—the fungi's degradative power is transformed into a mushroom boat that embodies villagers' hopes to restore their homes. Yet on the vast sea and before the enormous petrochemical zone, the mushroom boat's purifying power is negligible; purification is almost a futile act. The little boat drifting on the sea conveys a cruel but romantic feeling, and in this work, the fungi become agents and spokesvoices.
"To understand the state of microbes/plants is to better understand the world," Long Pan said. In Silk Thread, a delicate mycelial strand passes through the eye of a needle. In her description, mushrooms are powerful and willful, offering many possibilities as her artistic material—they can be an art form and a mode of life: "Mushrooms allow me to intervene in many more situations.”
Leaving the studio to witness what is really happening, Long Pan’s series of works were created on-site at social incidents and fungal growth sites. To study cordyceps, Wang Yiyi traveled alone to Lancang to find and document living fungi and their habitats; these were new experiences and stimuli. However, Cheng Xinhao also pointed out that when artists attempt to borrow anthropological and natural-science methods to enter the field and bring those findings into art, they may face outdated or even mistaken disciplinary knowledge. Interdisciplinary work is not merely romantic imagination and action; it requires a concrete expansion and updating of knowledge structures.
Going into the field brings you face-to-face with the primordial. Zheng Bo once mentioned indigenous concepts: everything is dynamic, full of possibility and power. In the Potawatomi language, there is a specific word (Puhpowee) describing the action of mushrooms emerging from the ground at night. At his home on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, he hangs a passage of “garden practice”: “Our garden must nourish. Our garden must connect. Our garden must be non-toxic. Our garden creates perception. Our garden provides space and time for wildness. Our garden brings discovery. We are animals, insects, water, air, rock, flowers, plants, microbes, electricity, weather, earth, sky, cosmos, and sometimes humans.”
Why gather these young artists in “The Language of Mushrooms”? “The process of convening and curating the exhibition is like running a laboratory. How do science and art find points of connection? How are the latest scientific discoveries translated and expressed in art? For example, the discovery of the ‘wood-wide web’ and the symbiosis between mycorrhizal fungi and trees has recently become a consensus in the natural sciences. But how to express the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants through art is a new interdisciplinary question at this moment. Focusing on plant life at the molecular level is the premise of Zheng Bo’s creative work.” The reversal of living environments and the overlapping of ecological and social problems are changing the questions posed to artists. Curator Ye Ying noted, “In selecting works for ‘The Language of Mushrooms,’ returning to Yunnan is, in a sense, a ‘retreat to advance’—stepping back gives us a new perspective. In this exhibition and in the work of this generation of young artists, you can see they have already grasped the information conveyed by mushrooms, mycelial networks, and even spores.”