Photographs by Ying Ang
Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies reframes fungi as metaphors for the female body, challenging dominant ideas of fertility and reproduction through a lush visual language rooted in ecofeminism.
Ying Ang’s latest photobook Fruiting Bodies reimagines the mushroom as a biological form and 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, Australia, the series examines how the fetishization 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 eroticized, reproductive framing of the female body in art and culture, yet they also resist it. Unlike traditional fertility symbols that reinforce womanhood as a vessel for production, these mushrooms thrive in cycles of decay and renewal, blurring the boundaries between birth, death, and transformation.
Ecofeminist scholars have long argued that patriarchal systems exploit the Earth and the female body through a logic of control. Fruiting Bodies responds to this by embracing the fungal model. a form of fertility that is rhizomatic rather than hierarchical; collective rather than possessive; disruptive rather than obedient. In these images, Ang challenges the fetishization of fertility and proposes a different kind of reproductive power: one that is intellectual, communal, and ever-evolving.
Fruiting Bodies by Ying Ang is published by Perimeter Editions and is available to buy here.
Biome
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.