Photographer Ying Ang’s new book, Fruiting Bodies, is a striking photographic exploration of mushrooms as both biological forms and feminist symbols. Featuring around 150 color and black and white photographs taken in inner-city parks near the artist’s home in Melbourne, Australia, the book challenges dominant ideas around fertility, nature, and the female body.
Photographed in natural light and close proximity, Ang’s images show mushrooms in varied states — solitary and erect, nestled in pairs, decaying and dispersing spores. It is rare to see mushrooms presented this way — the photographs give fungi the formal attention often reserved for human portraiture.
Where dominant cultural narratives often define womanhood by reproductive function, Ang’s work rejects this framing. It shifts focus to the postmenopausal body, treating aging not as decline but as another form of intelligence and power. “Past the urgency of being needed in a way that takes from the body,” one text reads. “They are now something else – watchers, holders of memory, storytellers.”
Ang extends the metaphor underground. Just as mycelium feeds and connects entire ecosystems from below, women in later stages of life continue to influence and sustain culture. “The roots, the filaments, the bodies beneath the body. The quiet labour of what holds the world together,” one line reads. The figure of the Kin Keeper appears here, not as an echo of past fertility, but as a living presence. Fruiting Bodies brings ideas from ecofeminist scholars into visual form, rejecting linear ideas of growth and productivity. The work questions what kind of power exists beyond reproduction.
Book Signing
Ying Ang will be signing Fruiting Bodies at Perimeter Editions table
Arles Books Fair
Friday, 11 July 5.30pm – 6.30pm
College Saint-Charles
https://www.perimeterbooks.com/blogs/program/perimeter-x-arles-book-fair-2025
Fruiting Bodies
Photographs and texts by Ying Ang
Design: Narelle Brewer for Perimeter Bureau
Published by Perimeter Editions
ISBN 978-1-922545-44-2
Otabind, softcover
160 Pages, 148 photos, 23 x 27 cm
£34.00 | €39.95 | $47.00
https://perimetereditions.com/FRUITING-BODIES
Exhibition
Ying Ang’s Gold Coast series will be exhibited in
‘On Country: Photography from Australia’ at the Rencontres d’Arles
Monday, 7 July – 5 October 2025
Église Sainte-Anne d’Arles
https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/1597/on-country-photography-from-australia
