Cover Ng Sze Kiat, the founder of Bewilder
Ng Sze Kiat, the founder of Bewilder
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A self-taught grower with an art-school sensibility, Ng Sze Kiat is transforming fungi into food and sculptural objects through mycological design studio and farm Bewilder
Ng Sze Kiat does not talk about mushrooms the way most people do. For him, they are not just ingredients or curiosities, but also companions and teachers. “I’m deeply in love with these organisms,” the founder of Bewilder, a fungi lab, farm and design studio in Singapore, says matter-of-factly. “We have a very close relationship.” Expounding on that connection, Ng shares that he sees himself as “a facilitator”; a guiding hand in the creation of the mycelium lamps Bewilder is known for and that fill its studio-farm hybrid space at Bukit Merah Central.
Of these other- worldly, sculptural forms—whose clustered silhouettes and branching textures resemble something dredged from the ocean floor, their surfaces recalling coral, bone or sea sponge—he remarks: “They’re not really my works. They’re finished by the organisms, not by me.” Indeed, while the mycelium is guided into moulds at first, its final shape is never entirely his to decide; it is the organism itself that ultimately determines how each piece evolves and resolves.
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Above Ng with the mycelium table and pendant lamp
Ng with the mycelium table and pendant lamp
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Interestingly, Ng did not set out to work with fungi. Rather than passion, it was curiosity that sparked the torch, stemming from a seed planted more than two decades ago by a friend. While Ng was pursuing his bachelor’s in film at Murdoch University in Australia, said friend, who was growing lion’s manes and oyster mushrooms, handed him a book on cultivation by Paul Stamets and while the subject felt, as he puts it, “so alien to me”, it stayed with him long after.
Ng moved to Istanbul a few years later and it was while living there that he put that curiosity into practice. With no firm plans, he began ordering cultures and growing oyster mushrooms himself. When he returned to Singapore, he joined a social enterprise focused on urban farming. There, he threw himself into research and development, including cultivating mushrooms from coffee waste, and eventually helped to set up the organisation’s farm while working alongside adults with Down’s syndrome—an experience he found deeply fulfilling.
“During that time, I began to see the different possibilities with mushrooms,” says Ng, referring to medicinal species, materials and products. To explore those possibilities, he left the organisation and started Bewilder in 2020, investing $3,000 into renovating his first tiny workspace—a sum that felt enormous at the time. He turned it into a lab and studio where he developed materials, and shared his early experiments on Instagram.
Above Gourmet mushrooms
Gourmet mushrooms
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Workshops came next, starting with fungi cultivation before expanding into tastings and mycelium experiments. Teaching, Ng realised, helped widen the conversation around fungi. Over time, those workshops evolved into full educational programmes. Today, Bewilder supplies cultures to and runs sessions for institutions from primary schools to universities.
But workshops and experiments alone could not sustain the studio. As interest grew and Ng moved into a larger space, another reality set in. “I realised I had to farm mushrooms in order to bring in the cash flow,” he says. The on-premise farm, built slowly over time, became the engine that powered everything else, from workshops to design experiments.
What sets Bewilder apart is how much of the cultivation process it controls in-house, its continual research, and its development of two to three new species every year. While some farms import pre-colonised substrate bags that only require the final fruiting stage to produce mushrooms, Bewilder develops its cultures from the ground up. “We make our own liquid cultures and grain spawn from our own cultures which we maintain and develop in our lab,” Ng explains.
Above The Mycosmos pendant lamp
The Mycosmos pendant lamp
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Today, Bewilder operates as a small-scale boutique mushroom farm producing one of the widest and wildest varieties of high-quality specialty mushrooms in Singapore. Among them are edible species such as old man mushrooms, midnight galaxies and almond buttons, and medicinal species such as tiger milk mushroom and over 20 types of Lingzhi, with a growing repertoire of native species.
Many are supplied to leading restaurants on a grow-to-order basis, allowing the farm to harvest only what is needed and reduce waste. Large- scale mushroom farms, Ng notes, often contend with significant surplus when production outpaces demand. “It can be as high as 40 per cent wastage,” he says. “Overproduction is something we frown upon as we are serious about our farming practices. We may lose some business, but it is better than losing our principles.”
The farm also cultivates medicinal varieties, including several species of Ganoderma—such as Ganoderma weberianum and Ganoderma neo-japonicum— traditionally valued for their immunomodulating and cardiovascular benefits. Bewilder’s approach, while slower and more demanding, allows it to grow varieties rarely encountered locally and to experiment with how fungi can be experienced.
Ng’s most recently finished piece, the Invertable
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Design has become one way to open that conversation. “There’s an art to science and a science to art,” Ng says. “Mushrooms embody both.” Bewilder’s sculptural lamps and installations serve as entry points into fungi’s wider world. The studio’s work has appeared at both local and international art and design festivals, including Singapore Art Week (2021) and Milan Design Week (2025), and is slated to be featured at Homo Faber 2026, taking place this September in Venice. Closer to home, Bewilder has also created commissions for corporate spaces, including growing mycelium festive decorations fashioned into Christmas trees for DBS before transforming them, post-season, into lighting installations across the bank’s offices.
Asked what he wants to make next, Ng mentions chairs. He is experimenting with hybrid or composite structures—mycelium combined with other materials such as metal—testing how the organism’s natural strength might translate into functional design. Ng is also exploring ways to scale the farming side of the business while keeping Bewilder’s current space focused on boutique cultivation and experimentation.
After 15 years of growing mushrooms, Ng still calls himself impatient. Perhaps that is the engine behind Bewilder: learning patience from organisms that grow entirely on their own terms. “Everything in nature has a time and place,” he says. “[Fungi are] my teachers and family.” His goal, simply, is “to spread the spores in Singapore”.
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Nafeesa Saini is the Features Editor at Tatler Singapore, where she shapes long-form stories on culture, business, philanthropy, wellness, and the people driving change in Asia. With a deep interest in storytelling that intersects meaningfully with identity and impact, she has profiled a diverse range of visionaries, from scientific pioneers in AI and health to creative trailblazers and literary minds.
Nafeesa’s writing includes cover stories and profiles that spotlight influential voices, alongside commentary on the trends reshaping our world.
Off the clock, Nafeesa unwinds with fiction, a good thrift hunt, and ‘brainrot’ TikTok scroll—while always keeping one eye on her next cultural getaway, usually to Indonesia.
