Echard's Art of Mutation Lands in Shanghai

The Longlati Foundation has opened "Winter Worm, Summer Grass," which marks the first solo exhibition in China of French artist Mimosa Echard. The exhibition will run until August 20, 2026, and is part of the 2026 Festival Croisements, highlighting the cultural exchange between China and France.

Echard, who won the 2022 Marcel Duchamp Prize, has contributed over 30 works that span a decade of her artistic practice, along with new site-specific installations. The title of the exhibition refers to the cordyceps fungus, a parasite that converts insect larvae into a medicinal substance known as "soft gold." This serves as a metaphor for the artist's investigation into mutation and interspecies metamorphosis.

The show opens with a new iteration of Echard's award-winning installation Escape More (2022). Unlike the original's sealed viewing chamber, the Shanghai version becomes a liminal "waiting room" where visitors cross transparent barriers to become part of the work. Local orchids – symbols of prosperity in feng shui – replace synthetic fluids, converting the piece into an energy-cleansing space.

Eight new bronze wall pieces with weathered patinas evoke urban architecture, and the Moment series, where pink is a powerful force – the metabolic system turned outward.

These two series form a vivid dialectic: sharing an origin in accumulation, they move toward opposing poles of visibility – the former as shiny, open containers; the latter as closed, heavy remains.

A macro view of cordyceps shows a vast history of global circulation. It encompasses the intricate histories of medicine, sustenance, and commodities as a metamorphic interspecies complex. From the high-altitude permafrost to the gilded windows of urban pharmacies, this hybrid of "worm" and "grass" is propelled by capital, undergoing a cross-border transmutation of value. The fungus, known as "soft gold" for its supposed vitality-boosting properties, mediates reproductive desire and social power. The cordyceps shows radical intimacy and symbiotic violence as the fungus digests and reorganizes the larva until they are inseparable.

Ultimately, the exhibition points toward the metamorphic quality of the "natural." For Echard, "nature" is something inherently slippery and mutant, while also ordinary and everyday, an event that we all collectively participate in. Like the city itself, as depicted in Echard's photography of Shanghai, this "new nature" is thoroughly permeated by human desire and the social and economic systems that condition it, constantly destroying its own image to become "something else." Propelled by this ambiguous desire – an impulse intrinsic to the logic of "winter worm, summer grass" – Echard transforms the gallery into a resonant field of perpetual displacement.

Scan to make reservation

If you go

Date: Through August 20, 2026

Opening hours: 11am-6pm, Tuesday–Saturday

Venue: Longlati Foundation

Address: 4/F, 30 Wen'an Rd 静安区文安路30号四层