A Mischievous Mushroom-Gymnopilus aeruginosus

, 2026, coloured pencil on watercolour paper, 58 x 38.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group. Photo by Felix SC Wong.

What is it like to live, sense, and feel as a mushroom? Over the past year, Zheng Mahler conducted extensive research on their local home island of Lantau, and encountered thirty-eight distinct species of mushrooms. After photographing and compiling their findings, they produced a unique dataset and fed it into a custom AI model — critiquing and simultaneously expanding AI's dearth of knowledge around mushrooms in connection with the Western world's fear of fungi, and to generate new, speculative mushroom species. The project likens the rhizomatic and seemingly infinitely generative nature of mushrooms to emergent AI systems and posits we understand each through the other. At the same time, it invites us to consider our preoccupations with generative qualities of 'fruiting bodies' and consider the responsive, cultivating qualities of 'network' inputs.


For their solo show at PHD Group, “Mushroom Clouds,” Zheng Mahler will build a large-scale living, breathing, terrarium which simulates the biodiverse ecosystems on Lantau Island, complete with plants and fungi. Within this terrarium, a dense cloud of fog occasionally forms as a reaction to systems of water, heat, and growth, in which projections of AI-hallucinated mushrooms appear, creating a ghostly display of Lantau fungi. A series of drawings of a number of fungi species found on Lantau and used in the AI dataset appears around the gallery space for visitors to similarly encounter and be guided through this immersive, unpredictable and expansive exhibition.


"Mushroom Clouds" is a companion exhibition to a new work commissioned by M+, "The Twenty-Three Thousand Sexes of Schizophyllum Commune and Other Stories," and completes Zheng Mahler's Lantau trilogy work, capturing their years-long research into the ontology of their more-than-human neighbours; water buffaloes, bats, and finally, fungi.


ZHENG MAHLER: MUSHROOM CLOUDS