For my Mother - Ren Hang

Sheer visual poetry; the naked human body represented in fragile compositions.

Ren Hang’s photographs are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. His gender- queer compositions are explicitly erotic but never pornographic.

Ren Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in idiosyncratic arrangements

and perspectives, referencing and simultaneously overwriting well- known motifs and traditions from Western art. He combines iconic images of William Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia in a river surrounded by flowers; of Leda, daughter of a Greek king, and the Swan; and of female nudes seen from behind using a distinctive visual vocabulary that draws on abstraction, Surrealism, Dada, and both historic and contemporary photography.

Ren Hang’s analog photographs use a playful, humorous visual language to relate the feelings, desires, fears, and loneliness of a young generation in China.

His works stand as symbols of the youth’s rebellion against the conventions of a restrictive communist regime in which nudity and sexual freedom are subject to government censure and control even up to the present day. Most of the people portrayed are the artist’s friends, but they remain unnamed and anonymous, and the images bear neither title nor place nor date. Although carefully staged, they are infused with an element of fleetingness and evanescence that is often the result of the artist’s quick way of working. Ren Hang’s photographs are a rare ode to human beings, their bodies, sexuality, beauty, and vulnerability.

stock number: NB721