Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies 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. Photographed while walking through inner-city parks close to the artist’s 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 – the act of pushing through and returning to the earth – evoke the eroticised, reproductive framing of the female body in art and culture, yet they also resist it.
- Softcover
- 160 Pages
- 27 x 23 x 2.5 cm
- Published 10th July 2025
- ISBN: 9781922545442