Junpeng Liang
Worldview render of Enso: brown lattice chair forms standing in a pale fibrous plain under an orange dusk sky, with slabs of broken rock behind.

Enso

The world is not one world. Fungi that break down wood so that a forest can begin again become agents of a cycle in which growth and decay are phases of a single movement. The resulting forms grow out of this behaviour rather than being drawn in advance, belonging to a world already unfolding alongside our own.

Concept

Enso is a speculative series built with white-rot fungus, lignin and a microbial growth medium. White-rot fungi are among the few organisms capable of breaking lignin down, taking a fallen tree apart so that its material can return to the forest floor. Decay is treated not as the end of a material’s life, but as a working condition. By translating invisible processes of growth and decomposition into geometry, material and printed form, Enso asks how a biological logic might enter the world as a physical object.

Fungi inhabit matter through a logic that does not begin with human intention. Rather than picturing another world, Enso builds small pieces of one. Fungal structures set the geometry, a growth model carries it forward through time, and the resulting objects take shape as furniture from a forest that keeps its own terms. They are proposals for such a world, rather than predictions of its future.

Gloved hands inspecting a piece of white-rot colonised wood beside dishes of red Congo red medium.
Colonised wood sample prepared for inoculation
Gloved hands holding an open dish of red medium, inoculating it with a loop.
Inoculation of lignin-containing Congo red medium
A single dish of orange Congo red medium under a ring light, dark fragments of colonised wood scattered across it.
Freshly inoculated culture viewed under transmitted light
A row of Congo red plates ranging from deep red to almost fully cleared, showing lignin consumed to different degrees.
Variations in Congo red medium following fungal cultivation
A Congo red dish cleared almost entirely to a pale, even tone, with fungal debris at one edge.
Even, continuous clearing zone
A Congo red dish with several separate rounded orange patches scattered across a pale ground, no single dominant colony.
Broken, lobed clearing boundary
A Congo red dish with a dense dark colony at the centre and a mottled orange bloom spreading outward from it.
Dense fungal growth at the centre

The circle

A Congo red culture medium is prepared with lignin and poured into Petri dishes. White-rot fungus is introduced at the centre, either as a pure culture or carried on a piece of colonised wood. As the fungus grows and breaks the lignin down, the red around it begins to clear. A pale circle appears and gradually expands across the dish.

The circle is not a form drawn in advance, but a boundary left over time by fungal growth and degradation. Enso begins, therefore, as a biological process in motion rather than a formal choice. Different colonies produce different boundaries: some even and continuous, others broken, lobed or dense at the centre. These changing circles became the first formal observations from which the rest of the project developed.

White mycelium branching across the bark of a decaying log.
Branching mycelium on decaying wood
White-rot mycelium spreading along the grain of a piece of wood.
Mycelial growth following the wood grain
Dense white and pale yellow mycelial growth across a bark surface.
Dense mycelial colonisation of a bark surface
Close magnified view of fine white hyphal filaments radiating from a colonised surface.
Exposed hyphal filaments under magnification
Magnified view of dense hyphal filaments covering an irregular surface.
Mycelial growth across an irregular surface
Magnified view of white hyphal growth over an uneven substrate.
Dense mycelial mat under magnification

Hyphal structure

Moving from a trace in time into spatial structure reveals the spatial language of fungal growth. Under magnification, white-rot fungus resolves into hyphae: fine tubular filaments that extend in straight or curved paths, branch irregularly and connect into dense networks. Within wood, these structures move through open cell cavities and pit openings, and sometimes pass directly across the walls separating one cell from another.

Observed from the surface of a decaying log down to the microscopic scale, the same behaviours continue to appear: the tube, the branch, the junction and the gradual spread across a boundary. These structures become a spatial vocabulary rather than an image to copy. Translating that vocabulary into a set of generative rules provides the basis for the next stage of form development.

Transmitted-light micrograph of colonised wood tissue, warm brown, fibrous structure running diagonally.
Colonised wood tissue under magnification
Grey-scale micrographs of the porous material in cross-section, cell walls separating dark filled chambers at several densities.
Porous network abstracted into a field of connected cells
Outline diagrams of the pore openings above the three-dimensional forms generated from them.
Extracted cell outlines translated into three-dimensional forms
Development of the simulated network
Simulated lignin decay unfolding through the generated form
Sequence of generated chair forms running from dense and enclosed to sparse and skeletal, each frame a step in the growth model.
Sixteen iterations, from dense to open structure

Growing the form

Turning fungal structure into a generative rule begins by treating the micrograph not as an image to reproduce, but as a field of relationships. Branches become directional nodes; the distances, connections and openings between them become variables in a parameterised matrix. Each iteration alters the one before it, allowing the network to extend, divide and reconnect over time.

Growth and degradation are run together through the sequence, gradually changing the density, openings and connections within the form. Different parameter values produce a family of outcomes rather than a single predetermined design: some remain dense and enclosed, while others open into larger cavities and thinner structures. The resulting geometry records how the system has developed and provides the basis for the forms taken forward into material printing.

Six petri dishes holding the material inputs, from coarse ground lignin fibre through fine powder to a translucent binder gel.
Constituents of the printable paste
Close-up of the paste extruder nozzle laying down a beige lattice layer on the print bed.
Layer-by-layer extrusion of the porous structure
A hexagonal lattice tile printed in the wet pink mix, still on the print bed mid-print.
Freshly printed lattice
Grid of six small printed lattice swatches in different colours and densities.
Test swatches comparing structure, porosity and colour
Extreme close-up render of the porous cellular structure at model scale.
Surface detail of the printed porous structure

Printing the substrate

The generated geometry is translated into a printable paste composed of cellulose, sodium alginate, pectin and lignin, together with a microbial growth medium. Extruded layer by layer, the mixture carries the porous network from a computational model into a physical substrate.

Once set, the printed forms are inoculated with white-rot fungus. Printing establishes a temporary structure rather than a finished state: the material remains open to biological growth and degradation, allowing its form to continue changing in response to its surroundings.

Enso I shown in a vitrine at the China Folk Art Museum: a small dark specimen under glass on a wood-frame plinth, a larger brown lattice form beside it, the museum's tiled roof visible through the window behind.
Installation view
Worldview render of Enso I: a single brown lattice form standing in a pale fibrous plain under an orange sky.
Enso I, speculative environment

Enso I

A biological logic gathers into a single proposition. No object is treated as complete or self-contained; growth, decay and material change continue to shape its identity over time.

Enso II, one of four seats, its surface almost closed with only shallow pits and craters.
Form 01
Enso II, one of four seats, a dense honeycomb wall of small cells.
Form 02
Enso II, one of four seats, an open cellular web with larger cavities.
Form 03
Enso II, one of four seats, a sparse skeletal frame of thin struts.
Form 04

Enso II

From the singular, the same logic opens into plurality. Shared rules produce different paths, allowing each form to hold a world of its own without becoming an ideal or final version.

The Enso series installed at the China Folk Art Museum: an array of wood-frame plinths on grey gravel carrying glass vitrines and brown lattice forms, with a printed wall panel behind.
Installation view

The series

Singular and plural worlds meet without collapsing into one. Coexistence becomes an ongoing negotiation between different agencies, scales and durations, none organised entirely around human terms.

Enso III, animated visualisation

Enso III

From object to family, and from family to world, fungal logic becomes an organising force. Enso III is not a prediction of another world, but a proposal already beginning to take form.

Junpeng Liang, 2023

With Chuan Ma, Weixi Kuang and Lanyu Kuang

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