White Fungus & The Subconscious Restaurant
Writing, reporting & photography on art, music, history, politics & more
Note: White Fungus & The Subconscious Restaurant are sister publications. Articles are produced both in English & Chinese.
whitefungus.com
"This is the new online platform for a long-ranging affair addressing matters that are important to us: art, music, history and politics. Typically, we’ve conducted this project – which extends beyond the written and digital page – in a manner perhaps best described by the phrase “don’t look back”, full speed ahead without a glance into the rearview mirror. And yet rapid developments over the past twelve months give pause for reflection.
This publication began in the spirit of pure anarchy. It was initiated as a pseudoanonymous protest against corporate interests overriding community values and concerns in Wellington, New Zealand, where the publication was initially based. In particular, the first issue was directed as a protest against the building of an innercity motorway that has subsequently displaced Wellington’s artists and left a hollow commercial shell where there was once a vibrant community. The publication was produced quickly on a photocopier, wrapped in Christmas paper and hurled anonymously through the entrances of local businesses. The road was built but nearly nine years on this publication continues.
White Fungus is now based in Taiwan where we discovered artists encountering their own struggles with consumerism, non-responsive government and a lack of space for activities that run counter to instrumental commercialism. Our connection to Taiwan stretches back to the beginning of 2000. We spent the first four years of the last decade here, experimenting and developing our aesthetic sensibilities, before returning to New Zealand and beginning the magazine. Now both Taiwanese and New Zealand culture are incorporated into a rich tapestry which extends across the world; as I write, we are preparing to release our 13th issue at Kadist in San Francisco, as part of a one-month magazine residency. White Fungus is committed to localism in its most resistant forms, but conducts that engagement on a global scale. It is a strategy of necessity. No single location could enable the sufficient level of support needed for this project to survive and even prosper. We believe that in order to counter the effects of globalization and its standardizing impact, it is necessary to develop an alternative globalization, one that connects diffuse points of resistance and self-determination across the world in a way that amplifies rather than reduces difference."
