Li Hao
Pop Forest - The Whisper
Pop Forest - The Whisper is a series of surreal and captivating sculptures which collage multiple types of fungi. It’s a kind of rare scientific specimen brought back from artist’s own unique visual world.
Inside the space, sun and artificial light underline the fine details of the huge mushrooms, dwarfing the viewers to let them scrutinize what the mushrooms’ vivid caps.
The macrocosmic energy encrusted around the sculptures betrays hint of their artist’s desire to divulge into the ways one understands and knows.
By delivering astounding aesthetic experiences in unexpected ways, This unique and imaginative art installation Pop Forest instantly and forever changes visitor perceptions about place.
The artist’s interest in mushrooms is based on their phenomenological and psychoactive properties.
Used for centuries to induce hallucinatory visions, mushrooms serve as the symbolic key to the mind-bending journeys the artist’s work regularly provides. They has been used for over 4,000 years in sacred rituals and ceremonies across the world.
It is a symbol which has lost its meaning, and therefore becomes an even stronger hint at the possibility of another culture, old or new (Baldo Hauser).
Mushroom has also become a symbol for the unexpected as it appears in fairy tales, early Walt Disney movies, and even in videogames such as Super Mario Bros.
The absence of or a reduced sense from an evolutionary context of the often-extravagant shapes, colors, and ingredients of mushrooms, hence they pose as symbols of ambiguity and uncertainty.
These mysterious vegetal elements (scientists still have many unanswered questions about them) are for artist, the icon of uncertainty, ambiguity. Mushrooms not only open our mind to unpredictable effects, but they do so by living and reproducing in mostly incomprehensible ways.
Those symbols of mushroom make us to believe one’s existence has been linked to mushrooms, which thrive even in the most unfavorable placements and braving through disasters.
