Jan
Van Eijgen

Driven by his fascination for the human body, Jan Van Eijgen graduated as a physician in 2019 and works as a resident in ophthalmology in the University Hospitals of Leuven, while pursuing a PhD in medicine at KU Leuven. During his education he learned about the mechanisms of metabolism and cell structures and increasingly got mesmerized by fungi. Fungal existence is essential for survival of almost all species, but can be life threatening at the same time. Fungus is omnipresent, highly adaptive to its environment and transforms its surroundings. Confronted with his own specialistic practice, Jan felt urged to contextualize care in a wider frame and started to work on co-existence with fungus as narrative and visual medium.

A residency in Cas-co, Leuven, led to a series of exhibitions and studio visits of international curators that enabled Jan to grow as an artist. His work now features in the Verbeke Foundation and Jan was awarded a grant for the genetic transformation of fungus by the city of Leuven. Either as large scale works or as microscopic interventions his research and work revolve around mutual manipulation and intrinsic questions of human presence in relation to their contextual environment.