THERE IS something quietly radical about the mushroom. Long dismissed as little more than a garden curiosity or biological oddity, fungi have recently emerged as unexpected heroes in ecological and cultural narratives — celebrated for their resilience, their intricate underground networks, and their refusal to conform to the tidy hierarchies of the plant and animal kingdoms. In Fruiting Bodies, Melbourne-based photographer and author Ying Ang takes this even further, using the humble mushroom as both subject and metaphor to mount a lyrical, deeply intelligent critique of how society views growth, fertility and the female body.
Ang is no stranger to crafting complex, multi-layered visual narratives. Having lived and worked in Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne and New York City, she is currently on the teaching faculty at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, serves as Director of Reflexions 2.0 — a Europe-based photographic masterclass — and sits on the board of the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. Her previous books, including Gold Coast and The Quickening, have won international awards and been exhibited widely, reinforcing her standing as a distinctive photographic voice attuned to both intimate personal experience and broader social currents.
Cycles of emergence, decay and return
Published by Perimeter Editions and launching this week at the Arles Books Fair 2025 — part of the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles festival in France — Fruiting Bodies marks Ang’s first collaboration with the Naarm/Melbourne publisher. The book reimagines the mushroom as both a biological form and a feminist metaphor: an emergent, generative force that challenges dominant narratives of fertility and the female body.
These mushrooms thrive through decay — blurring birth, death and everything between.
Photographed while walking through inner-city parks close to her home in Melbourne, the series examines how the fetishisation of fertility has shaped cultural perceptions of women, nature and reproduction — questioning whether growth and abundance must always serve a reproductive imperative. Ang’s photographs capture mushrooms in various states of emergence: solitary and erect, clustered in intimate pairs, decaying and dispersing spores. In these images, the fruiting body becomes an uncanny stand-in for the female form — soft yet resilient, sensuous, and categorically enigmatic.
The undulating stems and textured caps — pushing through and returning to the earth — echo the eroticised, reproductive framing of the female body in art and culture. Yet they also resist it. Unlike traditional fertility symbols that reinforce womanhood as merely a vessel for production, these mushrooms thrive in cycles of decay and renewal, blurring the boundaries between birth, death and transformation.
Beyond the fetish of fertility
Fruiting Bodies also draws fascinating parallels between the fungal model and certain schools of evolutionary theory that reconsider the role of postmenopausal women. Rather than seeing ageing as biological redundancy, these perspectives frame later life as a vital stage that sustains and enriches communities — a time to pass on knowledge, wisdom and cultural memory. In the same spirit, Ang’s work finds power in the non-reproductive phases of life. Just as mycelium persists unseen beneath the forest floor, feeding, connecting and shaping ecosystems, women beyond fertility continue to shape society in profound ways.
Rooted in ecofeminist thought, Fruiting Bodies critiques how patriarchal systems exploit both the earth and the female body through the same logic — one that demands constant output, control and utility. The book responds by embracing the fungal model: a form of fertility that is rhizomatic rather than hierarchical; collective rather than possessive; disruptive rather than obedient. Here, Ang challenges the fetishisation of fertility and proposes a different kind of reproductive power — one that is intellectual, communal, and ever-evolving.
A feminist poetics of ecology
The sequencing of Fruiting Bodies, aided by Perimeter’s understated design, invites slow, contemplative engagement. Pages breathe with white space, allowing each photograph to resonate on its own terms while gradually building thematic weight. The OTA-bound softcover feels intentionally modest, echoing the quiet humility of mushrooms themselves.
Most powerful is how Ang’s work collapses boundaries: between body and earth, life and death, the erotic and the organic. Her mushrooms are not simplistic stand-ins for womanhood. Instead, they remind us how little we understand the complex, entangled processes that sustain life. In this sense, Fruiting Bodies is not only feminist but profoundly ecological. It urges us to dismantle frameworks that seek to extract, categorise or simplify, inviting instead a deeper engagement with ambiguity, interdependence, and cycles that resist neat, linear resolution.
Not just feminist, but profoundly ecological: Ang’s work unravels the neat stories we tell about life.
In an era when climate urgencies and global debates over bodily autonomy dominate headlines, Fruiting Bodies feels especially relevant. It is a quiet book, with none of the bombast that often accompanies overtly activist projects, yet it is no less political. Ang suggests that how we look at a mushroom matters — because it shapes how we look at bodies, ageing, ecosystems, and ultimately, each other.
This is a photobook that rewards repeated viewing. It lingers, like damp air after rain, its spores taking hold in unexpected ways. In doing so, Fruiting Bodies offers not just a new way of seeing mushrooms or femininity, but a fresh understanding of interconnected life itself.
Book details
Ying Ang – Fruiting Bodies
Published by Perimeter Editions (Naarm/Melbourne), July 2025
160 pages, 23 x 27 cm, OTA bound softcover
Regular edition AUD $70
Special edition (50 copies), includes a signed and editioned diptych of archival inkjet prints (approx. 25 x 20.5 cm), AUD $250
- Officially launching at the Arles Books Fair 2025, with an artist signing at Collège Saint-Charles on Friday 11 July. Copies are available at the Perimeter Editions table throughout the fair, with pre-orders (including special editions) shipping worldwide from late July.
For more information or to purchase, visit Perimeter Editions.
- All images courtesy of Perimeter Editions
