Mingshi Lin

Mingshi Lin is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher and DPhil student at the University of Oxford. With a background in visual arts and Latin American studies, she explores the resonances and frictions between modern science, nature, and culture, particularly from Global South perspectives. She draws on diverse traditions, including ancient Chinese natural philosophy, Latin American indigenous cosmologies, and posthumanist thought. Engaging with plants, lines, and transparency, her works move beyond representation, creating dialogues between humans and non-humans, science and spirituality. Often poised between fragmentation and coherence, they don’t resolve contradiction but inhabit it, making “relationality” both method and medium. Her experience spans leading creative projects for the Olympics and international film productions. She was named one of Forbes China’s 2023 Top 100 Young Artists and was awarded the Official Olympic Commemorative Medal by the South Korean Ministry of Culture.

Spore Guerrilla draws on imagery of fungal life to depict a more-than-human sense of “ungrounding,” where mutation, dispersal, decay, and regeneration unfold simultaneously. Spore is a metaphor: unlike seeds, it is barely visible, drifting, and tenacious, taking root in hostile conditions wherever life seems near collapse. “Guerrilla” evokes a subterranean belligerence: not open combat, but a quiet and persistent refusal of capture and order.
Born of the land, these forms proliferate with a visceral, aquatic fluidity—echoing the gelatinous textures of molluscs. As environmental violence exposes the precarity of human dominance, the work shifts attention toward fragile yet resilient non-humans. In a world where renewal and destruction mirror one another, these fungal growths are both infestation and repair, clinging to ruins while threading new life. The absence of the human figure suggests ecology doesn’t always arrive in heroic spectacles. It may begin instead in quieter forms of attention, through forces, knowledges, and ways of being that lie beyond humanity, pulsing softly in the undergrowth.