Champignon 2021

Here we see *Champignon*, an image of a pastel hued figure adorned in fungi by the Taiwanese-American artist James Jean. Born in 1979, Jean pulls from a deep well of both Asian and European art history. The painting's hallucinatory aesthetic seems to simultaneously nod to the canon of traditional portraiture while subverting it. In the west, mushrooms are associated with fairytales and the world of childhood fantasy. In the east, they're often linked to images of longevity, a source of vitality and even immortality. Jean’s figures are often androgynous, their whiteness furthering the sense of a-gendered and ahistorical being. The imagery of the mushroom, then, pushes and prods at notions of identity. In the end, the artist seems to be less interested in traditional representation than in the alternative narratives that can be found in mythology, the stuff of dreams, and the natural world.