Ying Ang’s ecological and feminist politics
Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies, the artist’s third major book and first with Perimeter Editions, emerges from walks through inner-city parks near her Melbourne home. Thinking through the fetishisation of fertility and its impact on cultural views of womanhood, Jane Simon writes that the work offers a meditative exploration of bodies beyond reproduction, using tactile, intimate images of mushrooms to speculate on nature, personal history and ways of knowing.
Jane Simon | Book review | 31 July 2025
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Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies, published by Perimeter Editions, is a quiet, precise manifesto. It is a provocation to think about abundance beyond the frame of the reproductive body. This photobook is, in equal parts, exacting in its political and conceptual delivery while also an unhurried meditation on the promise and organic beauty of fungal forms.
The fruiting bodies of the title refer to the mushrooms that Ang photographed in Melbourne’s parks. Ang’s mushrooms are earthy, found sculptures. These are small growths we may not notice at our feet: bodies with expanses of folds, wrinkles and yearnings for darkness and light. They have stems, caps, gills, and an unseen underground pulse. Ang gives them her full attention, harnessing the close-up’s ability to experiment with scale and reorganise hierarchies of attention.
Fruiting Bodies is, in part, about the possibilities of bodies in states of transition. It is about change that is neither loss nor gain, but something vital and not-yet named. Ang generates this post-menopausal narrative without relying on the human figure. Instead, she has a singular focus on the erupting blooms of mushrooms: growths sustained from below through mycelium, that hidden system of collective exchange.
Descriptions of non-reproductive bodies often invoke the language of loss or failure. Ang gifts us another vocabulary through her detailed portraits of mushrooms and their cycles of growth, decay and regeneration. Ang pulls her viewers to the ground, holding her camera at grass level to show us the arch of the stems, the wonder of cups, these tiny architectural yet fleshy wonders. She displays their cracks, dissolves, their tears, their delicacy and brute strength. In a deliberate engagement with the links between questions of ecology and feminist politics, Ang reveals how proximity (in this case, to soil, organic matter, imperfect fungi) can recalibrate what we know and value about bodies, community and connection.
Fruiting Bodies has a slower rhythm than Ang’s last photobook The Quickening: A memoir on matrescence (2021), and her first major photobook, Gold Coast (2014). The Quickening reckons with the joys and seismic shifts of motherhood and post-partum anxiety. The photographs in The Quickening are like gasps for air: visceral fragments of life with an infant. Gold Coast reckons with the contradictions of a city marbled with racism, crime and bodies at leisure. Fruiting Bodies is a different type of book. This book is not a reckoning but a proposition, a firm insistence that the realm beyond fertility has paths to other possibilities, other generative modes, ones that are vital, creative, meaningful, crucial.
Ang’s fruiting bodies are sometimes ruffled and plump, others are slender and reaching. A notebook held at ground level becomes an in-situ studio, a backdrop to highlight the dirt clinging to a stem or the impressive force of a mushroom that has pushed through earth and risen with a wood chip delicately balanced on its cap.
Photography has played a fundamental role in valuing some bodies more than others, in rendering some invisible, unnoticed, and others too closely surveyed. This awareness is embedded in Fruiting Bodies. Ang’s studies of foraged mushrooms photographed simply on a white background are reminders of how photography has been used to collect, identify and fetishise, but this is not Ang’s project.
Ang’s visual language relies on seeing the mushrooms in a variety of ways. Ang mostly photographs the mushrooms in black and white. But the photobook has bursts of warm, earthy colour amongst its black and white pages. Some pages of the book reveal red eruptions, and bees forage near some of these fleshy forms. Others are fragile, almost transparent. Sometimes Ang’s mushrooms are at home in a tangle of woodchips, grass and dew. Other times, the mushrooms have been plucked and photographed later. Some of these mushrooms are dried and shrivelled. Some are palpably full and fleshy.
Ang’s mushrooms make me think about Simryn Gill’s series, Weeds in my Parents’ Garden (2018). In that series, Gill also photographs down near the ground, focusing on weeds in detail. Like Ang’s mushrooms, Gill’s weeds are personal (it is her parents’ garden) but also about a wider politics of attention to the unwanted or the devalued. Both Ang and Gill share a respect for the anti-monumental, and a speculative approach to thinking about nature, personal history and ways of knowing.
Ang’s curious eyes show us growth, decomposition, repair, and wonder. These are photographs to pore over. I recognise one mushroom as a shaggy mane mushroom, I look it up and learn that it matures fast, and as it does so, its gills liquify into an inky disintegration: a dissolving that releases and spreads spores. These fruiting bodies sometimes echo the human form. A pair of caps looks like breasts; the ruptures, splits and openings of several mushrooms are equally suggestive. But the point is not to anthropomorphise the fungal world, but rather to place those bodies in conversation with our own.
The figures of women are evoked directly in Fruiting Bodies through Ang’s exacting use of text. Ang is a photographer, but also a deft writer. The perspective here is born from the personal, but this is also about a collective experience of how women’s bodies are labelled, classified and devalued over a lifetime. Some things, Ang and her mushrooms tell us, are beyond the material body, outside anatomy. One page of text begins a list with mood and cognition and ends with hair and bones. Uterus sits in the middle of the list. I read the word and think of medical drawings and the persistent cultural imaginings of the uterus as a void or receptacle rather than the dense, powerful muscle it is. Just one misrecognition among many.
Opposite the list, a full page is dedicated to just two words: Kin Keeper. This role, so often undertaken by women, is, like the mushroom’s underground mycelium, part of a collective chain of reciprocity and care, shared stories, advice and memories. Ang references this type of work earlier in the book: ‘The quiet labour of what holds the world together.’
Fruiting Bodies has a line about a woman in the kitchen ‘peeling an orange, considering the weight of her own survival.’ Ang reminds us that ‘This, too, is a kind of freedom.’ It is the certainty of this felt freedom that knits together Ang’s beautiful, detailed mushroom portraits in this quiet force of a photobook. ♦
All images courtesy the artist and Perimeter Editions. © Ying Ang
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Jane Simon is an academic and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, where she researches and teaches in the areas of photography, screen media and visual culture. She is the author of The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2024). Her research examines photography’s role in the imagination and construction of housing and intimate home life.
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