2016-2017
Mycelium, cultivated lingzhi mushrooms and wood chips
dimensions variable
I am interested in the illusion of technological mastery over nature. In response, I construct controlled environments that gradually yield to organic processes. When cultivating Lingzhi, I initiate growth by placing woodchips and spores into a mold and regulating humidity, temperature, and light. At first, the form appears engineered. Yet once the mycelium binds the substrate and the mold is removed, the sculpture continues to evolve according to its own biological logic. Fruiting bodies emerge, spores settle as fine dust across the surface, and authorship shifts from design to negotiation.
These works examine collaboration rather than control. Mycelium demonstrates adaptation, self-organization, regeneration, and repair. The female busts in this series extend that inquiry by bringing fungal growth into dialogue with the human figure. The cultivated organism does not merely coat the form; it alters it, inhabits it, and complicates its boundaries. Human anatomy and fungal metabolism intersect within a shared material system.
Lingzhi carries deep cultural associations in Chinese medicine, mythology, and religious imagery, where it signifies vitality and endurance. In these sculptures, those meanings remain present but are activated through process rather than illustration. At the same time, Lingzhi functions as a living, renewable material, foregrounding ecological responsibility not as aesthetic theme, but as structural condition.
The work stages a fragile balance between intention and emergence, containment and expansion. It proposes sculpture as a site where human design and nonhuman agency coexist, each given space to act.
Read my paper Mythical Mushrooms: Hybrid Perspectives on Transcendental Matters