Mycelium Knowing
Mingyuan Hu
Mycelium
2025
This work reflects my recent intention to develop and foster kinship with materials and materiality, meaningfully bridging my previous thinking around symbols, languages, and discourse to a more material approach—in which queerness is embodied through the specificity of the constant process of materialization.
Mingyuan Hu
Mycelium
2025
This work reflects my recent intention to develop and foster kinship with materials and materiality, meaningfully bridging my previous thinking around symbols, languages, and discourse to a more material approach—in which queerness is embodied through the specificity of the constant process of materialization.
My project attempts to articulate the entanglement among materials and use mycelium’s bodily growing and consuming as a metaphor of how the activity of knowing has always been a process of mutual intervention and co-constitution.
In this system, subjects and objects are not stable and pre-given, but shifting based on the changing condition and situation. Mycelium’s bodily knowing that is always towards touching and transforming, is entangled with the archival elements (for example, the sheet protectors and info labels) that embody the rational discourse of humans’ ways of recognition. This tension is at the heart of the project’s narrative: here, human rational-discursive paradigms of knowing and mycelium’s bodily sensing co-constitute a site in which different ways of knowing are shown to actively participate in the enactment of materiality itself.
In this system, subjects and objects are not stable and pre-given, but shifting based on the changing condition and situation. Mycelium’s bodily knowing that is always towards touching and transforming, is entangled with the archival elements (for example, the sheet protectors and info labels) that embody the rational discourse of humans’ ways of recognition. This tension is at the heart of the project’s narrative: here, human rational-discursive paradigms of knowing and mycelium’s bodily sensing co-constitute a site in which different ways of knowing are shown to actively participate in the enactment of materiality itself.
