SPOTLIGHT ON:
Ren Hang

Ren Hang has created a remarkable body of work and his influence on photography, particularly in his native China, is powerful.

BY NICK RICE

Born in north east China’s Jilin province, the artist Ren Hang picked up a Minolta 35mm point and shoot whilst bored of studying advertising at university in Beijing in 2007… and with this action, the advertising world’s loss was the art world’s gain. And then tragic loss, as Hang committed suicide in 2017 at just 29. In this decade, Hang created a remarkable body of work and his influence on photography, particularly in his native China, is powerful.

Hang’s images are playful, beguiling, performative, and feature nudes and sexually explicit poses, all of which made him admired and targeted. Fellow artists like Ai Weiwei and photography lovers hailed the young photographer’s oeuvre, and Hang had an enormous social following during his career, but being a hero in LGBTQ+ communities and the striking nature of his work made him a target for China’s strict censorship laws.

Diminished as pornographic by the Chinese government, where production or dissemination of pornography can lead to imprisonment, Hang’s work was vandalized and his exhibitions were often shut down, and Hang was arrested multiple times. The sad irony being that Hang was never interested in challenging taboos or making statements against the Chinese state. He did not believe he was leading some kind of revolution. For him, nudity and sexuality were simply natural themes in his work.

He said, “Nudes are there since always. We were born nude. So, talking about revolution, I don't think there's anything to revolutionize. Unless people are born with clothes on, and I want to take their clothes off, then I think this is a revolution. If it was already like that, then it’s not a revolution. I just photographed things in their more natural conditions.”

Ren Hang remains a leading light in China’s burgeoning photography scene and is widely admired around the world.