In Fruiting Bodies, photographer Ying Ang rejects 'fetishisation' of mushrooms and of female beauty
She developed an intense fascination with mushrooms and began photographing them.
"The magic thing about photography is that you don't really know what something looks like photographed until you photograph it," Ang tells ABC Arts.
It turned out that, through her lens, mushrooms had a lot to say.
"I find something very surprising about them," Ang says.
Ang photographed mushrooms over eight months in 2024, and the resulting body of photographic work, Fruiting Bodies, launched at the prestigious Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in France earlier this month.
And it draws a strong connection between mushrooms and the female body.
Ang's compelling photographic series begins by confronting a struggle she considers common: women feeling they must cling to the fading remnants of their youth.
"Is that all we are — defined by what we once had? Or is there a deeper worth waiting to be uncovered?" she asks.
Ang says there is a "connection with lessons in the environment and lessons in feminism" — a school of thinking known as ecofeminism.
Using those notions as a foundation, she highlights the transient beauty of mushrooms, using them as metaphors for complex ideas around female beauty.
Female beauty is often considered fragile and something that diminishes with aging, Ang says.
She writes in Fruiting Bodies:
Here is how the world will try to make you small.
Here is how to stop it.
Here is what you do not have to endure.
Ang finds a common point between women's experiences and the vast underground mycelial network that supports mushrooms and the unseen world; there, she says, there is hidden strength and resilience.
Beyond the women in her life, who are her "key inspiration", Ang is inspired by authors such as Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk and "the richness of their interior landscape".
As a woman and a mother, Ang felt a deep curiosity about the stories her own body held within. "I mean, I've had a child, right? I've fulfilled my reproductive function, where is the value and function of my body?" she says.
Fruiting Bodies is an introspective journey, but it's one designed to speak broadly.
Mushrooms, with their ephemeral beauty, are a reminder of the interconnectedness of all life forms, Ang says.
She's also pushing back against the trend of fetishising mushrooms in artistic imagery, a common practice she encountered in researching her book.
"It's this full phallic pulsing at the peak of its reproductive state," she says.
Similarly, she argues that there is "a complete fetishisation of … our reproductive years as women".
While Ang believes women's worth is often tied to their youth and fertility, her work — by contrast — celebrates the value of women beyond these parameters, including their roles as storytellers, caregivers and vital links between generations.
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.
"I wish for [readers] to discover a secret that perhaps they have always known," Ang says. "I hope that people can meet me halfway as I introduce an idea, the beginning of a thread to be unravelled.
Fruiting Bodies is out now from Perimeter Editions.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ABC News
24-07-2025
- ABC News
In Fruiting Bodies, photographer Ying Ang rejects 'fetishisation' of mushrooms and of female beauty
Melbourne photographer and author Ying Ang was walking around inner-city gardens after her son's school drop-off when she became so fascinated by the mushrooms she noticed underfoot that her 20-minute walks began to spiral into into four-hour rambles. She developed an intense fascination with mushrooms and began photographing them. "The magic thing about photography is that you don't really know what something looks like photographed until you photograph it," Ang tells ABC Arts. It turned out that, through her lens, mushrooms had a lot to say. "I find something very surprising about them," Ang says. Ang photographed mushrooms over eight months in 2024, and the resulting body of photographic work, Fruiting Bodies, launched at the prestigious Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in France earlier this month. And it draws a strong connection between mushrooms and the female body. Ang's compelling photographic series begins by confronting a struggle she considers common: women feeling they must cling to the fading remnants of their youth. "Is that all we are — defined by what we once had? Or is there a deeper worth waiting to be uncovered?" she asks. Ang says there is a "connection with lessons in the environment and lessons in feminism" — a school of thinking known as ecofeminism. Using those notions as a foundation, she highlights the transient beauty of mushrooms, using them as metaphors for complex ideas around female beauty. Female beauty is often considered fragile and something that diminishes with aging, Ang says. She writes in Fruiting Bodies: Here is how the world will try to make you small. Here is how to stop it. Here is what you do not have to endure. Ang finds a common point between women's experiences and the vast underground mycelial network that supports mushrooms and the unseen world; there, she says, there is hidden strength and resilience. Beyond the women in her life, who are her "key inspiration", Ang is inspired by authors such as Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk and "the richness of their interior landscape". As a woman and a mother, Ang felt a deep curiosity about the stories her own body held within. "I mean, I've had a child, right? I've fulfilled my reproductive function, where is the value and function of my body?" she says. Fruiting Bodies is an introspective journey, but it's one designed to speak broadly. Mushrooms, with their ephemeral beauty, are a reminder of the interconnectedness of all life forms, Ang says. She's also pushing back against the trend of fetishising mushrooms in artistic imagery, a common practice she encountered in researching her book. "It's this full phallic pulsing at the peak of its reproductive state," she says. Similarly, she argues that there is "a complete fetishisation of … our reproductive years as women". While Ang believes women's worth is often tied to their youth and fertility, her work — by contrast — celebrates the value of women beyond these parameters, including their roles as storytellers, caregivers and vital links between generations. 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. "I wish for [readers] to discover a secret that perhaps they have always known," Ang says. "I hope that people can meet me halfway as I introduce an idea, the beginning of a thread to be unravelled. Fruiting Bodies is out now from Perimeter Editions.
ABC News
30-05-2025
- ABC News
The best new books released in May, from Hannah Kent, Ocean Vuong and more
The hunt for a good book never ends. Thankfully, our ABC Arts critics have been busy reading through piles of new releases to find their favourites to share with you. In this month's Best Books column, you'll find a poetic critique of inequality and exploitation in America, a revealing memoir from one of Australia's most beloved authors about her formative experience as an exchange student in Iceland, and an exciting and "ridiculously funny" debut about a literary fraudster in the tradition of Helen Demidenko. Jonathan Cape American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was born in Vietnam and moved to the US as a refugee with his mother. She — or a version of her — is the focus of his acclaimed 2019 novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. There are mothers and mother figures, absent fathers and refugee histories in his new novel, too, but The Emperor of Gladness is no repeat of his earlier work. Instead, we're taken into the heart of Gladness — East Gladness, to be precise — which is a place, in Cincinnati, rather than a state of joy or happiness. There's Vuong's playfulness, right there, because this is a town verging on a hellscape: depressed, post-industrial, poor, almost falling into the river. The novel opens in 2009 as a young man, Hai, is walking in the rain by that river, crossing the bridge, seriously contemplating jumping off and ending it all. Instead, he's stopped by an interaction with an elderly Lithuanian woman, Grazina, who invites him into her house. He ends up acting as her informal carer: an odd-couple device that's charming and complicated. But this is also a story of living on the margins, trying to get by, of underclasses and drugs, Alzheimer's and despair — and of unlikely alliances that extend well beyond Hai and Grazina. Hai works in a fast food franchise, Home Market, that provides an ensemble cast of characters whose backstories and sweaty hard work come more and more to the fore. Dishwashers, managers, cooks and a foray into wrestling — this is a portrait of America's workforce that is truly diverse, vivid, ground down and not at all clichéed. It's a community to root for, with an unexpected road trip thrown into the mix, that remakes a poetic (but unsentimental) version of Gladness. — Kate Evans W&N The Original Daughter is the story of sisterhood and its precarious balance of rivalry and love. Protagonist Genevieve lives as an only child until she is eight when her sister arrives. She recalls, "Arin didn't appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven." As an adult, she's estranged from Arin, and we spend the novel trying to determine what it is that broke them apart. As children, Genevieve and Arin fall easily into step as sisters, their relationship filled with joy and mutual admiration. But beneath this is the sting of jealousy. Genevieve is terrified that Arin will either steal her life or, worse, leave. She is torn between the love she feels for her sister and anger she feels when it seems that Arin might usurp her in their family hierarchy. Set against the vivid backdrop of working-class Singapore in the 2000s, Wei writes richly, skilfully and without hyperbole about what it means to be family and particularly what it means to be a 'Jie Jie' or sister. The Original Daughter asks with great care who we are if not amalgamations of the ones we love — mining unconsciously or consciously the mannerisms, behaviours and even lives of those we admire. — Rosie Ofori Ward Simon & Schuster/Summit Books Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators. For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a character who is a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body as a clinical trial subject at the local hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his "Melbourne-famous" writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would refuse an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary — part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner — she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It's not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the second-hand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers. This is a ridiculously funny meditation on careerism and economic precarity. In I Want Everything, the opportunism of the present eclipses… well, everything. Where authors once sought time and space to write, now they seek time and space to better leverage their brand. You may want it all, Amerena suggests, but first you'll need to sell yourself out — along with your friends, enemies, colleagues, fans, associates, pets, peers and family. — Declan Fry Picador Edith — the central character of British author Sarah Moss's ninth novel, Ripeness — grew up as an outsider, the daughter of a Jewish refugee and a northern English farmer. Now 73, she has separated from her husband of 40 years and found a home in a village in County Clare in Ireland. As her four passports attest, she doesn't belong anywhere but it's here she intends to stay, on "the wet coast of a wet North Atlantic island off a bigger wet North Atlantic island". The narrative shifts in the second chapter. It's the mid-60s and Edith, 17, is about to embark on a gap year in Europe before she commences at Oxford University. At the last minute, however, her mother changes the plan — rather than travel to Florence, Edith is to go to her sister Lydia, eight months pregnant and ensconced in a villa on the shores of Lake Como. Once there, Edith is to care for Lydia, a professional ballerina, and call a number when the baby comes. Told in alternating chapters (shifting between first-person narration in Italy and third-person in Ireland), the story's two strands bookend Edith's adult life. In Italy, she is an innocent whose knowledge of childbirth and motherhood comes from books and tending stock on the family farm. In her 70s, her pared-back life reflects the wisdom she's acquired over the decades; her house is small and neat, and her life is one of simple pleasures: walking outdoors, ocean swims, cups of tea, friendship and, on Thursday nights, sleeping with a companionable German potter who lives in the village. That's not to say Edith doesn't feel regret: for the baby born in Italy, for the years she spent trying to please others, for not being a better mother to her son. In Ripeness, Moss considers what it is to belong, the tension between age-old tradition and new ways of living, and how waves of migration shape communities. Moss also explores the thornier sides of motherhood: the effects of trauma, the historic shame of unwanted pregnancy and the ambivalence some people feel at becoming mothers at all. But Ripeness is also a moving and nuanced celebration of life, however imperfect its beginnings, and the joy of saying yes. — Nicola Heath Picador Hannah Kent wrote her way into the international literary scene in 2013 with a surprise bestseller, Burial Rites. Surprising? Only that she was a debut author, writing historical fiction set in Iceland in 1830, based on the real story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in that country. Since then, Kent has continued to write, create and imagine her way into the past — with The Good People (2016) and Devotion (2021) — but something kept pulling her back to Iceland, 16,000 km away from her South Australian home. In her memoir, Kent explains her connection to Iceland and revisits her writing of Burial Rites, lyrically and thoughtfully examining ideas of home and how it is that this 'foreign' country has inhabited her and continues to haunt her dreams and imagination. When she was 17, Kent travelled to Iceland as a Rotary Exchange Student. This experience is told with compelling clarity — the adventure, the bewildering language, not being met at the airport, the both warm and mystifyingly cold hosts, the shift that accompanies making new friendships and the growing appreciation of the wild white landscape. But that's not all — because the place, the stories, the archive, the families all followed her home. Followed her creatively, into the writing of Burial Rites, but kept following her for years after. And as this memoir opens, at home with a new baby, feeling detached from her body and delirious with tiredness, she realises that her sense of home, longing, memory, place and language are intimately tied to this distant land. A long way from Adelaide's heat. And so with a true writer's heart, she takes us back there — revealing silences and white stretches of paper, alongside the hush of snowfall and the white stretches of landscape. What does it mean, to be always home and always homesick? There are answers here. — Kate Evans Black Inc. The body of a girl, said to be a saint, is transported from the Pacific to the Kimberley. We know little about her. Why is she nameless? How did she reach the Pacific? Why is she beatified? One thing we do know: before she was entrusted to the care of a woodworker named Orrin, she was assaulted and died at the age of 14. Desecrations and loss haunt the saint's passage through time and space. The reader is encouraged to play detective, piecing together contextual details of the story's little worlds. Throughout the book, an omniscient narrative voice offers a sly, critical commentary on the saint's treatment and the characters' actions, contradicting the idea that she is either nameless or beatified. Thematic and narrative links between the book's four sections gradually emerge. A running theme throughout is grace, especially as women are afforded or denied it. The saint's existence in the form of a girl whose life was tragic and short suggests an ironic, if not aggrieved, stance toward notions of the sacred. Violence and erasure occur here in both dramatic and quiet ways. If the characters' failings are tempered by a desire for sacredness, it is a sacredness that often masks devastation: the Pacific island that forms the background to the opening vignette, for example, is depicted as a place gouged for phosphate mining and ruled by various colonial administrations; the failure of the girl saint's body to register any trace of the violence done to it is not absolution but a 'betrayal'. Rowe's graceful prose offers a suggestive, elliptical, thoughtful exploration of the lives of women. The result is a book about the hypocrisy and moral duplicity of a world more accustomed to realise its future ideals than its present. — Declan Fry Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
ABC News
19-05-2025
- ABC News
Nam Le wins Book of the Year at 2025 NSW Literary Awards for 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Nam Le has won the top prize at the NSW Literary Awards for his debut collection of poetry — and his second book — 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. It's his second Book of the Year win at the event formerly known as the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, after his short story collection The Boat won in 2009. At this year's event at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the Vietnamese Australian author also won the $30,000 Multicultural NSW Award, taking his total winnings to $40,000. The judges described the collection as "damning, frank and unwavering … passionate and bold in its depiction of otherness, trauma and struggle". Le told ABC Arts he's "stoked" to have won at the NSW Literary Awards. Accepting the Multicultural NSW Award via video message, Le — who came to Australia as a refugee from Vietnam when he was less than a year old — dedicated the award to his dad, "whose whole life has been an engine of multiculturalism in this country". Le's publisher Ben Ball accepted Book of the Year on his behalf, reading a prepared speech from Le, in which he asked whether multiculturalism has become "complacent". "If we think about the horror in Gaza — and how can we not — and how it has affected us here, perhaps we need new questions like: should the goal of multiculturalism be co-existence or cohesion?" Le wrote. "What good is harmony if it only and always exists on terms dictated by power? … What good is diversity if it recognises every group's difference but not every group's dignity? "When [diversity] doesn't challenge or threaten power, then how is it more than mere colourwash?" Le told ABC Arts the response to his newest book has been "warming" — especially among other writers from marginalised backgrounds. Other winners at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards — worth a total of $360,000 — include Fiona McFarlane, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for her novel of interconnected stories linked to a serial killer, Highway 13; James Bradley, who won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction for his ode to the ocean, Deep Water; and Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his debut book rock flight, about the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Accepting his award, Hourani described rock flight as a book "about protests, and one that acts as a protest for Palestinian liberation". "Narratives of occupation, grief and resistance are difficult to capture straightforwardly. I wrote rock flight in order to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine." In some ways, Le has been working on 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem since he first started writing, giving up his job as a corporate lawyer to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the United States in 2004. But it was being asked to write a piece for the 25th anniversary reissue of Watermark, an anthology of Vietnamese American writing, in 2021 that spurred him to begin working seriously on the book-length poem. Le wanted the book to reflect his own "ambiguity and ambivalence" about the idea of a Vietnamese poem. In [2. Invocative / Apostrophic], he writes: "Whatever I write is Vietnamese. I can never not — You won't let me not — Lick the leash or bite it." Le explains: "If [the book] were to represent where I was at and what I was feeling about poetry and identity, culture and language, it would need to be something that was never fixed, always in flux, and always undermined and undermining other certainties. "What I feel is so contingent and so changeable, so I wanted a field of poems where the poems could actually exert pressure and counterpressure on each other." It gives his collection of poems a sense of energy and playfulness. It's also a reflection of Le's maturation as a writer — the collection coming 16 years after his highly praised debut, The Boat, which was released when he was just 29 years old. "As a younger writer, you're wanting to convey authority by having answers; by the carriage of certainty," Le says. "As you go on and get whacked around by life, you realise not knowing or not being sure of things is not a sign of lesser knowing. "In fact, asking questions and not being sure, and having the wherewithal to change your mind, or to hold contradictory things in your mind, is a more truthful way of representing what it actually feels like to be around." While his first taste of success was The Boat, Le's first literary love was poetry. He grew up reading Francis Turner Palgrave's anthology of English poetry, his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, first published in 1861, and picking up books of classic poetry in second-hand bookstores. It doesn't matter if the poetry he reads was written today or centuries ago. "Good poetry, almost by definition, is alive," he says. "Whether it's written in really classical, metrical verse forms from hundreds of years ago, or whether it's written in the crucible of now, it speaks to what it sees, but it also speaks to the tradition that's around it." He describes Australian poetry today as "incredibly eclectic" and "draw[ing] from so many different traditions". In a country with such a strong migrant population, he says, "we each bring our own matrices of histories and stories and memories and cultural references". Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani — who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry — finds reading Australian poetry "refreshing", because it speaks to "particular intricacies and nuances of certain movements and communities". He also appreciates the camaraderie among poets. "Because the Australian poetry landscape doesn't feel as saturated as other English language scenes, there ends up being a sense of community that translates on the page in a really beautiful and memorable way," he says. Hourani grew up between the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Australia, reading the poetry of WB Yeats and later Carol Ann Duffy, the UK's poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It was at university that he finally came across poetry similar to the kind he wanted to write. "I discovered that poetry didn't need to take itself so seriously, even if the subject matter itself was quite grave," he says. "[Rock flight] was an entertaining book to write because the way that I play with theme and language — while it's distressing and often so violent — it still is kind of tongue-in-cheek and playful." Hourani began writing his book-length poem rock flight during a COVID lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. In the book, he writes about visiting Palestine for the first time in 2019, when he was 22; and about historical and present-day injustices inflicted on Palestinian people. "I was figuring out what I could do from a distance," he says. "And what I could do is write and publish within this continent and hope that it will spread to different continents too." Like Le, Hourani reflects on the limitations of language in his poetry. "i go to palestine with a new journal thought i'd write some metaphors but return with scant pages of questions and fodder. the more time i spend with words the more i realise that they just won't do." The NSW Literary Awards judges described rock flight as a "rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone". Hourani made some of his last changes to the book in October 2023. Since then, more than 53,000 Palestinians — including at least 160 journalists — have been killed in the war in Gaza. "It feels really distressing to see that this book is being read and shared and even published, when journalists across Palestine and specifically in Gaza have been targeted and killed," he says. "It has been really confronting seeing that all of my references in the book predate 2023 and yet they still remain as relevant as they are." He says when he started writing the book he wanted to "advocate for Palestinian liberation to people who might not yet be convinced that's a just thing for us to ask for". It started as a work of non-fiction, tracing his family's history in the region, including his grandparents escaping war-torn Palestine in 1948. But he soon realised he could do more with poetry; he could make the book non-linear and tangential, and pepper it with recurring motifs like rocks, flight and contaminated water, all building to a picture of the history of Palestinian struggle. "It's felt a lot of the time like history has been repeating over again for the better part of a century," he says. "The long-form poem allows it to be one contained story, in the way that this history is one contained story." Hourani also wanted to write for other Palestinians and allies. "Palestinian writing in Australia, but also now globally, isn't being given that freedom of expression and that airtime that it deserves and needs," he says. "I really wanted to utilise the space as much as I could." He wants his readers to "feel like there is always something to be done, tangibly and materially, to contribute to the struggle". "A poet could dedicate this time to bearing witness to these atrocities, or they could dedicate the time to recoup and have readers feel re-energised to enter the struggle after a week of awful headlines. "There is no one answer to what a poet's duty is at a time like this." Book of the Year ($10,000) 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia) Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000) Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin) Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000) Deep Water by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton Australia) Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000) rock flight by Hasib Hourani (Giramondo Publishing) Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature ($30,000) Silver Linings by Katrina Nannestad (HarperCollins Publishers) Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature ($30,000) Anomaly by Emma Lord (Affirm Press) Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000) Three Magpies Perched in a Tree by Glenn Shea (Currency Press/La Mama Theatre) Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000) Inside by Charles Williams (Simpatico Films, Macgowan Films, Never Sleep Pictures) Indigenous Writers' Prize ($30,000) When the World Was Soft by Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation (Allen & Unwin) Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000) 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia) UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($10,000) Jilya by Dr Tracy Westerman (UQP) Translation Prize ($30,000) The Trial of Anna Thalberg by Eduardo Sangarcía, translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer (Restless Books) Special Award Liminal University of Sydney People's Choice Award ($5,000) The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin)
