A visionary art mythos by John Shook · rooted on Chia
The story is simple, the way old stories are. A person wanders past the edge of the map, into the forest. They find the Magic Tree. And in its presence, they are transformed — no longer merely human, but a mushroom deity: a FunGuy, a Being with an origin, a lineage, and a place in something larger.
That moment of becoming is the Gathering. It happened once with around thirty hand-painted statues on a gallery wall. It happens again every time someone finds their way here and stays. The people who do are called Gatherers — not customers, not an audience. Kin, connected underground like everything alive in a forest is.
No placeholders this time. Airbrush, ink, flats, and finished color — every FunGuy below is John's hand. Captions describe; naming belongs to the artist.
// captions are descriptions, not names. Names and origins wait for John's telling.
This world began as sculpture — cast, sculpted, and hand-painted wall statues, around thirty of them, painted by artists from all over the country. And it already fits in a pocket: the first magnets sit right beside the Beings they were born from.
John designed this coin study — the Being rendered as if struck from the earth itself, hands folded, cap wide.
What it becomes — metal in a Gatherer's palm, an emblem on Chia, or pure myth — is the artist's call. For now it sits here the way a seed sits in soil.
On the true path, every FunGuy is drawn by John's hand, layer by layer — cap, gaze, robe, companion. The true Beings live in the gallery above; the shapes below are geometric stand-ins that only sketch the mechanic: how a Gatherer might one day approach the tree and watch a Being take shape from hand-drawn parts.
Pittsburgh-based, multidisciplinary, visionary. John works across painting, drawing, sculpture, tattoo, and digital media — methodical and intricate, full of geometric pattern, alien characteristics, and futuristic design, all of it unmistakably drawn by hand.
His work hangs at BoxHeart Gallery, lives in permanent installation at Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and grows out of Endonaut Gallery, which he founded. The FunGuy form — the robed, crowned mushroom Being at the heart of this world — originated with him and remains his alone to draw.
Not "the founder." Not "the dev." Not "the team." The artist.
Here the bard steps aside for a moment, because you deserve the plain version. This world lives on the Chia network, and that choice is part of its soul, not a footnote.
Each FunGuy is created under Chia's NFT1 standard — a distinct on-chain object with its own history, not a row in someone's database. Its full provenance travels with it forever.
John signs the work with a Decentralized Identifier (DID) — an on-chain artist identity. Anyone can verify a FunGuy is authentic and not a copycat, without trusting a marketplace to vouch for it.
On Chia, artist royalties are enforced by the network itself on every sale — not by a marketplace's goodwill. Value keeps returning to the artist automatically, like nutrients cycling through soil.
Offer Files let two Gatherers trade directly, peer to peer, with no middleman required. You never have to hand your FunGuy to a platform to sell or swap it.
Chia runs on Proof of Space and Time — secured by unused storage rather than energy-hungry computation. A world about regeneration should not cost the earth to exist.