Fruiting Bodies

Rooted in ecofeminist thought, Ying Ang’s new book Fruiting Bodies depicts mushrooms growing in pairs, in clusters, or alone - their delicate structures echoing the human body and reclaiming the organic world as a site of feminist inquiry. Like the female body, mushrooms have been understood and valued primarily through their reproductive function. Yet, beneath the surface, a vast underground mycelial network is vital in ways that defy conventional visibility: in care, in knowledge, in reciprocity. Fruiting Bodies documents these quiet, transient structures as metaphors that challenge dominant narratives of fertility and productivity.

Fruiting Bodies has received Honorable Mention for the Pollux Prize and International Photography Awards, was the winner of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the nature category, finalist for the Encontros da Imagem Book Award, Form Photo Award and Lucie Foundation Book Prize for 2025 and selected for the PhotoVogue East & Southeast Asian Panorama to be shown in Milan in 2026.

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Special Edition + 2 prints in a diptych
AU$250
Signed edition of 50
25 x 20.5cm signed edition of 50 diptych prints
ORDER HERE

Trade edition
AU$70
ORDER HERE

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160 pages, 23 x 27cm,
OTA bind, softcover
Perimeter Editions 111
First Edition of 2000
ISBN: 978-1-922545-44-2
Publication date: July 2025

Printed Offset by Wilco Art Books, Netherlands
Published by Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Australia
Editors: Justine Ellis, Ash Holmes, Dan Rule
Design: Narelle Brewer for Perimeter Bureau
Lithography: Mariska Bijl, robstolk® amsterdam

For international wholesale and distribution enquiries,
images and information, please contact Perimeter Editions, Melbourne:
hello@perimetereditions.com
+61 3 9484 8101

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Reviews:

"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."
- 1000 Words

"In Fruiting Bodies, each mushroom image stands alone as a portrait, allowing readers to appreciate the delicate details and to find a deeper significance. The book is not just a collection of photographs; it is a journey into the heart of what it means to exist, to be seen and to reclaim one's narrative in a world that often overlooks the profound connections between life, death and everything in between."
- ABC

"Following Ang’s previous successes with Gold Coast and The Quickening, Fruiting Bodies continues her exploration of personal, political, and bodily narratives. By connecting ecofeminist thought with visual storytelling, the work challenges linear ideas of growth, productivity, and the female form, offering a fresh perspective on what it means to age with agency and dignity."
- Zero Nine Magazine

"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."
- Atmos

"Fruiting Bodies doesn’t stop at metaphor. It becomes a visual liturgy. Ang frames fungal bodies with the same sacred composure typically reserved for human portraiture. She photographs them in their excess — in saturated pigments, damp soils, acid greens, ferrous reds, and also in a black and white that is never neutral, but rather an etching, a residue, a resonance. Each image evokes a forgotten iconography — of cycles, of decay as threshold, of life regenerating through surrender."
- c41

"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."
- M-Artlens

"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"
- The Guardian

Interview:

"It is always personal. I found myself pushing against cultural narratives of my own value as an aging woman. I questioned where my social value was as a woman that was no longer noticed in the street or desired by men as a sexual object. I began to answer those questions on these long walks home and found a sisterhood in this kingdom in the earth that has long evaded definition and continues to spark fascination. I began photographing these mushrooms that I found as portraits of women, growing, dying, with their families and their loved ones."
- About Photography