In 2004, the New Zealand government was tearing through Wellington's arts district to build an inner-city motorway. Heritage buildings were demolished. Artists were evicted from their studios. The protests went largely unheard. Ron Hanson, a journalism graduate who had spent four years living in Taiwan with his brother Mark, responded the only way he knew how: he recruited friends to write pseudonymous articles, sneaked into his father's law offices at night to use the photocopier, and bound the results by hand. The finished zines were wrapped in Christmas paper and hurled anonymously through the entrances of businesses across the city. He intended it as a one-off. He called it White Fungus, after a can of pulped mushroom beverage Mark had found in a Taichung supermarket the year before — a product so mundane in Taiwan and so baffling everywhere else that it seemed, somehow, to capture something essential about the strangeness of branding itself.
Within two months, readers were demanding a second issue. By the fifth issue, in 2006, San Francisco's City Lights bookstore was stocking it — the first outlet outside New Zealand to do so. A meeting with Taipei artist Yao Jui-Chung, who urged the brothers to return to Asia, proved decisive. In 2009, White Fungus relocated to Taichung, where Ron and Mark funded the publication by teaching English and spent every remaining hour on the magazine. Each issue — produced at a pace of roughly one per year — explored art, music, politics, and history with the same restless, boundary-crossing curiosity. Coverage ranged from Taiwanese noise music pioneers like Wang Fujui to Carolee Schneemann, from Taiwan's post-martial-law experimental scene to New Zealand's Pink and White Terraces. Every cover derives from a scan of that original can.
In 2012, a White Fungus issue appeared in a magazine exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Hansons didn't blink. They kept teaching, kept publishing, kept throwing release parties at Taipei nightclubs where performance artists from New York shared bills with local DJs and Japanese noise musicians. A mainstream Taiwanese financial magazine featured them in 2014, and overnight their Facebook likes jumped from one to tens of thousands. The magazine didn't change. Eighteen issues in, White Fungus remains exactly what it has always been: a publication made by two brothers who believe that the patient, stubborn work of connecting Taiwan's art scenes with the rest of the world is worth doing — even if it takes decades.
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