Fruiting Bodies, by Ying Ang, reimagines the mushroom as a biological form and, at the same time, as a feminist metaphor: an emerging, generative force that challenges dominant narratives about fertility and the female body. Photographed during walks through urban parks near the artist’s home in Melbourne, the series examines how the idealisation and fetishisation of fertility have shaped our cultural perception of women, nature and reproduction, asking whether growth and abundance must necessarily be tied to a reproductive purpose.
Ang’s photographs show mushrooms at different stages of development: solitary and upright, grouped in intimate pairs, decaying or dispersing their spores. In these images, the fruiting body becomes an unsettling alternative representation of the female form: soft yet resilient, sensual and difficult to classify. The undulating stems and textured surfaces of the caps, as well as the act of emerging from the earth and later returning to it, evoke the eroticised and reproductive representation of the female body in art and culture, while also resisting it. Unlike traditional symbols of fertility, which tend to associate femininity with the ability to produce, these mushrooms thrive within cycles of decay and renewal, blurring the boundaries between birth, death and transformation.
Certain strands of evolutionary theory have examined the role of women after menopause, reframing ageing not as a stage of biological redundancy but as a period of life capable of sustaining and enriching communities. From this perspective, life beyond the reproductive years plays an important role in transmitting knowledge, experience and cultural memory. Similarly, Fruiting Bodies, Ang’s first book published by Perimeter Editions, finds a form of power in the non-reproductive stages of life. Just as mycelium remains hidden beneath the forest floor, nourishing, connecting and transforming ecosystems, women who have moved beyond their fertile years continue to profoundly influence society.
For some time, various writers associated with ecofeminism have pointed out that patriarchal systems can exploit both the earth and the female body through a similar logic, based on a constant demand for production, control and usefulness. Fruiting Bodies responds to this idea by adopting the model of fungi: a form of fertility that is rhizomatic rather than hierarchical, collective rather than possessive, and disruptive rather than obedient.
Ying Ang thus challenges the fetishisation of fertility and proposes another way of understanding reproductive power, linked not necessarily to procreation but also to knowledge, community and the enduring capacity for transformation.
