Biography
Ren Hang - the photographer who treats body parts like legos from Matthew Chiang YouTube channel.
Ren Hang was born on 30 March 1987 in a suburb of Changchun, in Jilin province, northeastern China. He went to Beijing to study advertising, and the sources give slightly different timelines. One places his move to the capital at seventeen, another says he bought his first camera in 2007 to fight the boredom of college life. They agree on what followed: he drifted away from his studies and devoted himself to photography, which he had taught himself. He named the Japanese artist Shuji Terayama as an inspiration, and critics often add Nobuyoshi Araki to his lineage.
His first subjects were his roommates and friends. He once said he preferred photographing people he knew because strangers made him nervous. Word spread among his peers, and soon many young people were asking to pose for him. Between 2011 and 2012 he produced a first series of small self published books, including Room and Nude, in editions of a few hundred copies, followed by Republic in Norway. His work travelled through blogs and social platforms long before it reached galleries.
At home, the same images that made him known also made him a target. Ren Hang was reportedly detained by the authorities several times, and his work was frequently censored or labelled pornographic. He refused the role of activist. He said he did not think in cultural or political terms and did not set out to push boundaries. In his view nudity was simply the condition in which people are born.
Abroad, recognition grew quickly. In 2010 he received the Third Terna Contemporary Art Award in Italy. Ai Weiwei backed him, included him in the 2013 show Fuck Off 2 The Sequel in the Netherlands and curated his 2014 exhibition in Paris. Ai Weiwei described the images as fresh, yet empty and superficial, with a deep sadness inside.
Solo exhibitions followed in Oslo, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Vienna, New York and Athens, where he took part in an artist residency in 2015. In 2016 he won the Outset Unseen Exhibition Fund. His photographs appeared in L’Officiel, GQ Style and Vice, and an image of his was chosen for the cover of Aperture’s issue on the theme Queer.
Fashion houses such as Gucci, Rick Owens and Loewe are also associated with his name.
Photography was only one of his languages. Ren Hang also wrote poetry, short and direct, with a tone that moves from humour to sensuality to darkness. His themes are desire, the ideal of love, and the fear and loneliness that follow its loss. A collection of his poems appeared in Chinese in Taiwan in 2013, and an English selection, Word or two, was published in New York in January 2017.
Depression ran through his adult life. He documented it openly on his website, in a section titled My Depression, with diary entries and poems that describe fear, anxiety and inner conflict, including hallucinations and voices. On 27 January 2017, the eve of the Chinese New Year, he posted his last message on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter), saying his wish every year was the same: to die earlier. He died by suicide in Beijing on 24 February 2017, at the age of twenty nine.
His reputation has kept growing since. In 2017 Foam in Amsterdam and Fotografiska in Stockholm opened exhibitions on his work, and the documentary I’ve Got a Little Problem, directed by Ximing Zhang, was released the same year. Posthumous retrospectives followed in Leipzig, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, at C/O Berlin, at the Centro Pecci in Prato and at the Sozzani Foundation in Milan in 2020. His works are now held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the White Rabbit Gallery.
Approach and Technique
TUTTI NASCIAMO NUDI | Ran Hang Documentary from DFNDAF YouTube channel.
Ren Hang worked with the simplest tools. He used small, cheap compact cameras, mostly 35mm, and by his own account he broke them regularly. He shot incessantly, in quick succession, in a way closer to a daily practice than to a planned production. The direct flash and the saturated, high contrast colour gave his images a frontal, almost clinical clarity, in which skin, lips and nails become graphic elements.
His method combined direction and improvisation. A gallery representing his estate describes his pictures as balanced between meticulous intentionality and momentary inspiration. He choreographed the arrangement of the bodies, the make up (red lips and red nails recur often) and the mise en scène, and then left room for the instant. His models were friends and acquaintances, so the sessions had a familiar, playful character, and he claimed that the process was meant to be fun for both photographer and photographed.
He had no favourite place. Bare studios, apartments, parks, forests and rooftops all served him, because he believed anywhere could be beautiful and worth shooting. Props came from the everyday and the natural world: plants, flowers, animals, food, a watermelon. Bodies are folded, stacked and intertwined until they stop reading as individuals and become shapes. In one celebrated image a row of backsides evokes a mountain range. The Sozzani Foundation describes how he treated the body as an abstract form, often through unexpected perspectives, and how his compositions echo motifs from Western art history.
Nudity was the centre of the work because, in his words, people arrive in the world naked, and the naked body is the original version of a person. Genitals and breasts are shown frankly, sometimes accentuated by close ups, without the intent to shock. He extended the same treatment to men and women alike, with bodies slim, young and nearly hairless, and he blurred gender with stacked figures, shots from behind and men wearing stockings and lipstick. Asked about his preferences, he said gender mattered to him mostly in the bedroom.
Ren Hang refused to give his images a vocabulary. He did not title or date his works and disliked explaining them. His most famous series, My Mum, shows his clothed mother posing in daily settings, in the same playful, slightly fetishistic atmosphere as the rest of his work. He also kept a personal archive, I Hate My Past and I Don’t Want to Know My Future, with portraits of the people he met, accompanied by small objects.
Many viewers see, beneath the humour and colour, a thread of solitude and vulnerability. His galleries describe loneliness and fragility inside the playful scenes, and his poems and diary entries confirm the same register. The camera, for him, was a way to stay close to bodies and to people at a time when closeness was difficult.
Personal Considerations
Getting Close to REN HANG from
Daniel Frei Films.
The brief life, work and end of this photographer is intriguing, a real puzzle to solve. What I wrote above comes from the different angles through which information about him reaches us.
If you look at his pictures, you can enjoy his bursting creativity and his joy in the very act of making images with his friends and fellow students. The simple camera, the defined and contrasty images and the in your face depiction of male and female nudity remind me of a mix of Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton, who are, as I have written before, far to my own inspiration and motivation in art photography.
If you read the biographical material about his upbringing, studies and practice, you understand that a creative soul was born in China, one of the hardest places in the world for that to happen. This helps explain why he gave his images no political or social value, and why he avoided titles and explanations. It did not stop the authorities from targeting his exhibitions and the photographer himself, who was reportedly detained several times.
Then you search for videos on YouTube and find only a few, sparse ones (Western social media censorship is a curse), and you learn that he struggled with depression since his school days and wrote about it on his blog.
So, if we combine these three angles to give him a more three dimensional image, what do we get? A fragile diamond that burst into light in the land where tanks crushed a young generation in 1989. His free, creative photography was a drive for freedom and self expression, the hunger for life of a self taught young man who never indulged in the stale idea of technically perfect photography, where the gear grows bigger than the photographer, instead he reached the heart of image making fast.
In a YouTube video that I am sharing here you can see him hoping for a smooth and simple life: calling some friends three or four days a week and going up on a rooftop, into an apartment or out in the open air to make new images together. That would have been good and productive in itself, considering that fashion brands reportedly took an interest in his work.
Had he been born in the West, in any free country, he could have built a fruitful career and life. His inner demons might have condemned him anyway, but he would have faced less pressure from above. He lived in Beijing instead, where there is a ceiling that cannot be crossed without jail, persecution or worse. Frail since his school days, he faced the prospect of persecution like the one suffered by Ai Weiwei and others, and it was too much. His depression spiraled out of control and ended his young life.
Sometimes even a brief art life, so carefully kept away from social and political fights, can become, through how it developed and ended, an accusation against an inhuman political system that crushed him. Whatever the system propaganda says, it just protects the power of the few, parasites who suck life from their own country, and it stays in constant struggle with the instincts and rightful aspirations of its people.
Sometimes even a brilliant and fast ended life shows what free people do not want: no autocracy, no strong man (or woman) in power, no forced control.
Shine on!