Fruiting Bodies

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sep 16

Photographer Ying Ang’s latest photobook, Fruiting Bodies, debuts at the New York Art Book Fair. Exploring mushrooms as biological and feminist symbols, Ang’s intimate images challenge conventional ideas of fertility, aging, and the female body. The work reframes postmenopausal life as a site of intelligence, presence, and quiet power.

Photography Ying Ang

Fruiting Bodies presents around 150 colour and black-and-white photographs taken in inner-city parks near Ang’s Melbourne home. Using natural light and close perspectives, the book highlights mushrooms in all stages of life, solitary, paired, decaying, elevating them to a level of formal attention usually reserved for human portraiture.

Ang’s work reframes aging and womanhood, rejecting societal definitions tied to reproductive function. The book emphasises the postmenopausal body as powerful and perceptive, capable of sustaining culture much like underground mycelium nourishes ecosystems. Texts interwoven with the imagery celebrate quiet strength, memory, and presence beyond fertility, presenting a poetic vision of life and continuity.

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.

“The roots, the filaments, the bodies beneath the body. The quiet labour of what holds the world together.”

About Ying Ang

Based in Melbourne, Australia, Ying Ang is a photographer and author with an extensive exhibition history and client base, having lived and worked in Singapore, Sydney and New York City. She is part of the teaching faculty at the International Center of Photography (NY), the Director of Reflexions 2.0, and a board member of the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne).

Ying was also the co-founder and head curator of Le Space Gallery 2019–2024. Her two self-published artist books, Gold Coast (2014) and The Quickening (2021) garnered international critical acclaim and were awarded and shortlisted for various high-profile prizes, including the New York Photo Festival and Encontros Da Imagem book prize, the Belfast Photo Festival 2021 book prize, the Tokyo International Foto Awards and the Prix Pictet award. Ying was a commissioned artist for PHOTO2022 International Festival of Photography and will exhibit at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles festival in Arles, France.

To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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Photographer Ying Ang’s latest photobook, Fruiting Bodies, debuts at the New York Art Book Fair. Exploring mushrooms as biological and feminist symbols, Ang’s intimate images challenge conventional ideas of fertility, aging, and the female body. The work reframes postmenopausal life as a site of intelligence, presence, and quiet power.

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Fruiting Bodies

“The roots, the filaments, the bodies beneath the body. The quiet labour of what holds the world together.”

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