

Dr. Patricia Kaishian led Arts of Noticing, an outdoor mycological fieldwork session that took participants from the temple gate into the surrounding forest of Bak Lim Sa's 180 acres. Framing fungi as queer organisms that challenge hierarchies of life, death, and classification, Kaishian guided a practice of slow, interdependent observation—turning the temple grounds into a living classroom for interspecies attunement. Drawing on her research into Laboulbeniales fungi and her essay The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline, the session proposed the forest as a site of radical entanglement: a space where knowledge emerges from relation rather than extraction.