Mingshi Lin
Spore Guerrilla, 2026
Oil on linen
Unframed: 80 x 60 x 3 cm
Framed: 83 x 63 x 5 cm
Framed: 83 x 63 x 5 cm
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This work is available to view online or by request. Changing Ideas Award 'Spore Guerrilla' (2026) responds to the ecological crisis by shifting attention away from human control and toward...
This work is available to view online or by request.
Changing Ideas Award
"Spore Guerrilla" (2026) responds to the ecological crisis by shifting attention away from human control and toward vulnerable non-human forms of life. Drawing on fungal imagery, the work evokes a sense of weightlessness and imagines a more-than-human world, where mutation, dispersal, decay, and regeneration unfold simultaneously. The spore is a metaphor: unlike seeds, spores do not depend on stable ground. Barely visible, drifting, tenacious, and capable of lying dormant, they take root in hostile conditions wherever life seems fragile or near collapse. “Guerrilla” evokes a dispersed, 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 mollusks. As climate crisis, extraction, and environmental violence expose the limitation and precarity of anthropocentric dominance, “spore” and “guerrilla” become a way of thinking about ecology beyond the human. Attuned to posthumanist thought, this work gives form to overlooked yet resilient fungal life. 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 through them. The intentional absence of the human figure suggests that ecological transformation 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.
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, her practice explores the resonances and frictions between science, ecology, and more-than-human life through Global South perspectives.
Changing Ideas Award
"Spore Guerrilla" (2026) responds to the ecological crisis by shifting attention away from human control and toward vulnerable non-human forms of life. Drawing on fungal imagery, the work evokes a sense of weightlessness and imagines a more-than-human world, where mutation, dispersal, decay, and regeneration unfold simultaneously. The spore is a metaphor: unlike seeds, spores do not depend on stable ground. Barely visible, drifting, tenacious, and capable of lying dormant, they take root in hostile conditions wherever life seems fragile or near collapse. “Guerrilla” evokes a dispersed, 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 mollusks. As climate crisis, extraction, and environmental violence expose the limitation and precarity of anthropocentric dominance, “spore” and “guerrilla” become a way of thinking about ecology beyond the human. Attuned to posthumanist thought, this work gives form to overlooked yet resilient fungal life. 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 through them. The intentional absence of the human figure suggests that ecological transformation 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.
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, her practice explores the resonances and frictions between science, ecology, and more-than-human life through Global South perspectives.