Mushrooms and Mycelia

2023-2024

On ecological painting

I used to believe that science and art were two separate paths in my life. In actuality, these paths are intertwined and guide my personal growth. My training as a scientist taught me to become observant and think critically, and painting renewed my sense of curiosity toward the world. I cultivated my brand of imagination through the studies in science, and developed painting techniques informed by engineering discipline. So when I wonder why do we make art? what compels me to paint?, it is through the entanglement of art and science I develop my understanding. Science expands our understanding of the world and provides tools for complex challenges humanity faces. But some of the challenges require not only tools for addressing them but a cultural transformation that would allow us to see these complex challenges in new light. I paint with a belief that the arts provide transformative experience as necessary building blocks for the cultural evolution.

Mushrooms, fungi, and mycelia fascinate me as a scientist and compel me as an artist. Their colors and shapes enthrall my imagination, and I love the challenge of capturing their essence in my paintings. They flaunt how lifeforms can vary widely and very weirdly. These paintings are trippy because these organisms live mind-bending lives that sometimes exceed our imagination: they are the largest organisms sprawling just below earth’s crest; some has singular intelligence that surpass human’s; and some can control minds of other animals. They spread and they become the environment and meld other animals within it. All individuality melts away. Understanding and embodying this quality of mushrooms, fungi, and mycelia are, I believe, a necessary condition for seeing the world in new light. 

Ecology is a word derived from an ancient Greek: Oekologie, meaning study of house. These are ecological paintings, through which we can imagine how mushrooms, fungi, and mycelia make a home in nature. Wendell Berry in Home Economics poses the question of how we should live responsibly in nature, not against wildness but as an integral part.The task of making a home in nature responsibly requires understanding how and where we fit in the house. These ecological paintings unfold the psychedelic experience of blurring the perceptual and cultural boundaries between individuals and between worlds.