They say the good ones die young, and groundbreaking Chinese photographer Ren Hang is tragically no exception. A name that broke Chinese conventions and taboos to bring candid nude Chinese portraiture to the world, Ren Hang may have left this world before his 30th Birthday, but he will live on in the Photography Hall of Fame as an artist who was equal parts courageous and infinitely fragile.
Censored by his homeland although his art was apolitical, ambivalent to the advertising world yet revered by magazine editors and high-end brands globally, Ren Hang’s story is one of paradox and disassociation. So much so that he once released a series of poems and prose entitled “My Depression”, highlighting his lifelong battle to feel connected to the world. This tome remains perhaps the best verbal expression of his visionary yet disconnected imagery, an existential tableau of limbs and nude body parts in playfully random arrangement, like a puzzle with no solution, against a background of Pop Eden.
Ren Hang was due to release his first retrospective with Taschen, entitled Ren Hang this year. Curated by infamous pornographer Dian Hanson, the Queen of Sex once described him as an “unlikely rebel” and coming from a modest blue collar family that was possibly “too normal”, perhaps this is a fair appraisal. Hang was born May 30th, 1987, in the “Detroit of China”, the North Eastern province of Jilin. His dad worked on the railways and his mother in printing. He moved to Beijing at the age of 17 to pursue a career in advertising. Finding himself ambivalent to the process, Hang took up a point and shoot camera and began photographing his dorm friends in carefully composed yet subversive poses. The candid images displayed something new- nude yet asexual, genderless and openly irreverent. The Chinese authorities were not pleased.
Hang explained why he was arrested repeatedly yet remained to true to his art throughout. “It is very difficult to shoot nudes in China”, he told French magazine Purple. “They generally abhor nudity here. We hide the body in our culture.” His work was deemed pornographic, showcasing “public licentiousness”. Yet Hang insisted he was not intentionally being provocative. “I don’t think so much in cultural context or political context…I don’t intentionally push boundaries. I just do what I do,” he told Taschen.
Hang’s work was first showcased in 2009 in small local group exhibitions and self-published books. But his unique worldview- showcasing an artificial paradise where waterlilies, snakes, birds, octopus, hog heads and toy dinosaurs, were juxtaposed with nude Chinese figures, lipsticked labia, even his mother – served to launch him out of China and into the international spotlight.
Alongside his twenty solo exhibitions and seventy group shows globally, Hang accepted commercial contracts in his final years, photographing brand imagery for the likes of Gucci, Maison Kitsune, Totem Collective handbags and singer/rapper Frank Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry fan magazine. Despite this endorsement, his images retained a casual defiance, as if he was forever the boy at play with his friends, ill cast in the role of cultural creator, resisting absorption into the mainstream establishment.
This feeling is reflected in his 2014 poem “Gift”, translated below:
Life is really one
Precious gift
But sometimes I feel that
It has been given to the wrong person
Ren Hang committed suicide on February 24th 2017 in Beijing at the age of 29. His works are currently on display at the Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm, Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, and the KWM Artcenter, Beijing.
