In an explosive yet brief career, photographer Ren Hang, through his daring nude portraits of his friends and family, changed the trajectory of contemporary Chinese photography. Swiftly becoming an international enfant terrible placed in uneasy contestation with the Chinese state, the political connotations built onto Ren’s work by the West shrouded his much more personal desire to earnestly explore Man’s relationships with Nature through the nude form. Staff writer reflects on this mission and Ren’s photographic utopias in this features piece.
When I view my reflection in a mirror, no matter what angle I look it always seems like I’m about to go attend my own funeral. The negativity is that heavy. Every destination is as if I am paying my last respects before rushing off to the funeral hall.
-Ren Hang
On 24 February 2017, the prodigious 29-year-old photographer Ren Hang leapt to his death from the roof of a Beijing high-rise, one month shy of his 30th birthday. The news – sudden, catastrophic – sent tectonic shockwaves through the photographic community: “I had seen tributes beginning to form on Twitter,” recalled writer Ashleigh Kane to DAZED on hearing the news, “but I thought it can’t be true.” However, voices from around the artworld continued to pour out their tributes. “Taschen is devastated by the death of Chinese photographer Ren Hang,” shared the German publisher, who carried Ren’s first and already-seminal international monograph, describing him as a “self-taught master of surrealistic, startling, and beautiful pictures.” For Eli Klein, whose New York gallery held one of his first solo shows, he was a “talented and rising young photographer who passed away well before his time.” And, for French publishing house Pierre Bessard, it was “Mon ami [my friend] Ren” who “left us this morning.” As this collective keening reached its mournful crescendo, however, “the news became more of a reality than rumour,” recalls Pierre Bessard.
Born on 30 March 1987 in the city of Changchun, one of the cradles of China’s growling automobile industry, Ren relocated to Beijing at the age of 17 to study advertising. There he started photography as a pastime at the age of 20 to alleviate the existential ennui of day-to-day life, snapping portraits of his friends on a cheap Minolta point-and-shoot film camera and sharing them to social media. “I usually shoot my friends,” he would later confess, his rationale divvied between a pragmatism and a shyness, “because strangers make me nervous.”
What then began as mischievous photographs of his flatmates wandering the home nude amidst the thick heat of the Beijing summer swiftly evolved for Ren into a heuristic philosophy of nakedness and the erotic. Whereas the nude body has been an aesthetic cornerstone of Western artwork since the Greco-Roman era, no such tradition has ever existed in Chinese art, where nudity has long been considered a form of indecency and has been institutionally prohibited since the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Ren’s photography exposes the absurdity of such statutes. “We were born naked,” he always insisted, “[…] I just photographed things in their most natural conditions.”
Ren’s iconography is thus that of a new-age Taoist oneness with the natural world, in which the body returns to an Edenic utopia of exposed cocks, cunts, and skin and re-joins the pristine ecosystems from which we have tried to break away. Taxidermy doves, pig heads, monumental lily pads, and fish-market octopi thus counted among just some of Ren’s favourite, if grotesquely unconventional, compositional accoutrements.
The dreamlike choreography of his work, in which bodies are transformed into twisting Rubik’s cubes of flesh, hybrid masses of limbs, genitals, animals, and plants, has certain resonances with artists from the Western world, evoking work by Terry Richardson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Farber, and Guy Bourdin. However, Ren’s personal pantheon was built of East Asian giants, the phantasmagorical Japanese avant-gardist Shūji Terayama and the erotic enfant terrible Nobuyoshi Araki being his primary influences. About the former, he once said “Terayama’s photos […],” which often look something taken from a freak-circus snuff film, “bring me to orgasms,” he said. “[It’s] like the pleasure of cumming but without masturbation”.
Ren was equally affected by the si sheying movement, a turn-of-the-millennium viral phenomenon that saw China’s camera-wielding youth turn their private spaces, the banality of the quotidian, into spectacularised surrealist otherworlds. The methodology was the same as that which Ren would later adopt: cheap cameras, meticulous compositions, and a semi-artificial aura of spontaneity, perhaps first mastered by Lin Zhipeng, better known by the enigmatic alias “No.223”, the name of the lovelorn protagonist from Wong Kar-wai’s saudade-drenched 1994 film Chungking Express.
The point of these references being, the universalism of Ren’s more general themes – desire, isolation, and an existential malaise paradigmatic of the millennial condition – shroud the geographic particularity of his mission, to sexually liberate himself and a repressed Chinese youth from both a state-sanctioned discourse that suffocates free thought and a Western gaze that simultaneously makes of the East Asian body a castrato and fetish. “I like sex,” he once bluntly explained, “I want to say that our [Chinese peoples’] cocks and pussies are not embarrassing at all.” The matter-of-fact succinctness of the confession feels jolting, even to “progressive” Western ears. But why? Sex, nudity, our bodies: all are natural in Ren’s photographic utopias, as they should be in our present world.
As Ren’s work gained traction outside his native China and started to circulate the European and American art markets, new, Sinophobia-tinged politics were steadily syringed into his works. Taschen described him as an “unlikely rebel”, gallery descriptions making of him a renegade martyr taking a defiant sword to the stringent censorship laws of Xi Jinping’s state. What was highlighted above all else was Ren’s run-ins with the Chinese law, the fact his art was frequently vandalised in public, and that he was once arrested for shooting naked outside, breaching the PRC’s 1949 law. What was omitted, however, was the fact Ren denounced any political significance to his work, insisting that his images were not taboo and that he did not seek to push boundaries and that “my picture’s politics have nothing to do with China. It’s Chinese politics that wants to interfere with my art.” When asked why the nudity, despite the controversy and trouble it brought, he would often shrug: “It’s more natural if they’re not wearing clothes.”
Taking to Ren’s personal blog-cum-postmodern poetry collection titled My Depression and you see his artwork’s real raison-d’être:
There are some days
We shower together
Sleep together
Get up together
Eat together
Even piss together
Even shit together
I shit
You’re at my side watchingBut still it’s only some days.
Or the poem I quoted at the start:
When I view my reflection in a mirror, no matter what angle I look it always seems like I’m about to go attend my own funeral. The negativity is that heavy. Every destination is as if I am paying my last respects before rushing off to the funeral hall.
Ren’s photos and poems fall as part of the same puzzle – one entangling questions of love, sexuality, identity, purpose, and loneliness – but whose maladroit pieces never quite fit into place, as if a hand-me-down whose essential parts have been lost somewhere along the line. And, while we must veer away from the uneasy romanticism of the tortured artist trope, underlying Ren’s art there is an intensely personal and desperately cathartic unifying thread, a desire to disentangle love from sexuality from identity from purpose from loneliness throughout his work. This is why he created uncanny otherworlds where Man and Nature are returned to one and where his mother can kiss a pig and where beautiful, naked people can kiss one another and lick one another and it isn’t pornographic or weird or disruptive, but playful, exquisitely erotic, and, above all else, natural. Those photos and those poems, these ideas, are certainly universal, but at the same time they were painfully, disastrously personal for Ren. So he imagined, choreographed, and created a something more out of the melancholy of today and, through this process, gave the watching world a vision, an illumination, a prophecy of a better world. A beautiful, naked utopia waiting for us in someplace else, someplace beyond.
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