Blank Canvas is proud to present Fruiting Bodies, a new solo exhibition by Penang-based artist Hasanul Isyraf Idris. The exhibition takes its title from the mycological term for the reproductive structures of fungi, a.k.a. mushrooms: the visible “fruit” of a larger fungal organism, emerging aboveground to spread its spores while a hidden network of mycelium extends in dense webs below the surface.

In recent years, Hasanul’s painting practice has revolved around the biodiversity of a plot of land that he and his family acquired in Selama, a rural district of Perak located about two hours’ drive from the artist’s George Town residence. Hasanul has been slowly developing the land, erecting a small vacation home for his family and, more recently, beginning construction on a studio for himself. Parts of the land have been cleared to make way for these two new human habitations, while much of its natural environment continues to proliferate in clusters of brambles and bushes around the edges. Within this small patch of privately owned wilderness, an astonishing variety of local flora and fauna can still be encountered. Several of these specimens have appeared in previous painting series, together forming an evolving artistic index of the biodiversity found on Hasanul’s land.

The present exhibition consists of small paintings on paper depicting fruiting bodies, mycelium, and other small forest friends. The fruiting bodies (a.k.a. mushrooms) are depicted in all their glorious variety: some fuzzy and white, resembling tiny parasols; others brown and oyster-like. They are the faceless extras of the forest ensemble, so humble, small, and chameleon-like as to be easily overlooked, while belonging to vast subterranean fungal networks. Through their mycelium, fungi form intricate relationships with the wider forest structure in an ecological exchange popularly known as the “wood wide web”. On the symbolic plane, Hasanul, being an artist somewhat on the fringes of the scene’s urban centre, is also interested in how life mimics the natural world, how ideas and influences are transmitted and propagated beyond what we see on the surface, beyond even the cycle of life and death.  

Accompanying the paintings is an installation of tactile mycelium experimentation that the artist has developed in close collaboration with Dr Rosnida Tajuddin, a mycologist at the School of Biological Sciences in Universiti Sains Malaysia.