Jae Rhim Lee is describing what she would like to happen to her body after she dies. No simple coffin or cremation for her. Instead, the South Korean artist is keen to be devoured – which is why she has designed a burial suit that, in her own words, looks like “ninja pyjamas”. Covering every part of her body, the outfit is black with white, branch-like patterns forking down it. The lining, she goes on to explain in an intriguing video posted online in 2011, will be filled with mushroom spores that have been “trained” to recognise her as food, thanks to having being fed bits of Lee’s shed skin, hair and nails. After she dies, she will be placed in the suit and these cultivated mushrooms will – hopefully – eat her. As she says: “For some of you, this might be really, really out there.”
Well, yes. But no more out there than a lot of the strange things on display at Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi, a new exhibition at Somerset House, London, that aims to show how, over the last few decades, mushrooms have become muses for artists, as well as useful tools for them to work with. “Mushrooms are playful,” says Francesca Gavin, who curated the show and runs the Instagram page @theartofmushrooms. “They’re colourful. They remind us of childhood. They’re also delightfully phallic, which is always a pleasure.”