Ren Hang (1987–2017)

Ren Hang was a young contemporary photographer based in Beijing. Despite China’s harsh restrictions on sexuality in the arts, Hang’s photography heavily featured nude appearances, often of his friends and lovers.
Physical Borderline accompanied Hang’s 2014 exhibition of the same name. In the photos, Hang drops all knowledge of the word “taboo” and arranges his (mostly naked) subjects to assume myriad strange and imaginative forms. Physical Borderline is one more testament of Hang’s playful exploration of sexuality and his approach to liberate the human body from any restraints.… (más)

Ren Hang, who took his life February 23, 2017, was an unlikely rebel. Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 29-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront Chinese artists’ battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, “I don’t really view my work as taboo, because I don’t think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don’t intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.”

Why? Because his models, friends, and in his last years, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever entered his mind at the moment. He denied his intentions were sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, “there are a lot of dicks … do you just like dicks?” Ren responded, “It’s not just dicks I’m interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.” True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed were not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends.

In the same piece, Hang also stated, “Gender isn’t important when I’m taking pictures, it only matters to me when I’m having sex,” making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website and Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $ 600. TASCHEN’s Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren’s joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.… (más)

‘ Those who are reading this article might have heard of Ren Hang. After his intensive exhibitions and media exposure around the world, his works can be seen online or on magazines. All of those public photographs were selected among tens of thousands of pictures, which, he considers, were perfect. During our daily contact with Ren Hang, we have seen Ren Hang’s many unpublished photos. Some of those exposed his feet by accident, or he used his feet to feed and tread male models. This kind of insignificant act got our attention, and then it occurred to us to edit a compilation of photos about feet.

To print these unpublished works means that Ren Hang had to show his not so perfect works. It sure was a pressure for a person with a certain degree of stubbornness. In the end we cajoled him into giving us these pictures. The end product is a lively food party with photos being connected using party lingos. The word food has similar pronunciation with foot, which coincides with those feeding action in photos. The whole book seems humorous and nonsensical, which is very close to the Ren Hang whom we know.

The idea of this zine was born in the autumn of 2014. Because of the provocativeness of the photos, it was refused many times by printing houses. So we had to replace some pictures and change the design to make it more “artistic”. Still it was not accepted. In the end we replaced those pages with nude photos with something else, and only then did we finish the printing by the end of February 2015. As for how we replace them, you will understand after reading the zine. The additional tablecloth echoes the theme of Food Issue and also tones down a bit the eroticism. You can use it for wrapping or accessory. It’s up to you.’ (Same Paper)… (más)

The fourth and most ambitious yet of Ren Hang’s self-published books presents new selections of the artist’s now-infamous photography, which explores in raw and often disturbing detail issues of gender, fetishism and sexuality. Part performance and part carefully posed floor show Ren’s confrontational and provocative works tread a delicate line between art and pornography in which friends and lovers are shown in explicit poses and fetishist contortions. Unsurprisingly his images have stirred controversy in China where they have faced criticism for being obscene and vulgar. Yet for all the criticism Ren Hang remains one of the most uncompromising and unflinching of China's new generation artists working today.… (más)