Two photographers capture wild-spirited
youths in raw, uncensored snapshotsStripped Bare
146Book Reviews
146 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103Book Reviews
| MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103The 29-year-old Chinese photographer Ren Hang
enjoyed a busy, successful career with a full exhibition
calendar before he committed suicide in Beijing
in February 2017. Ren’s penchant for producing
straightforward, self-consciously posed color portraits
of nude women and men engaging in a wide variety of
sexual permutations raised hackles among Chinese
authorities but has garnered him an international,
cult-like following. His notoriety was derived from his
unabashed, naive shots of straight and gay individuals,
the figures often absurdly accompanied by octopi,
snakes, lizards, cigarette smoke, fish, plastic bags and
pastoral settings.
Thumbing through Taschen’s 312-page retrospective
volume, published in January before Ren’s untimely
passing, I was embarrassed and delighted in turn by the
explicitness of erect penises arrayed like an armorial
crest, an octopus worn like a balaclava, vignettes of
sex-show antics, and the like. Welcome to the serene,
surreal, laugh-out-loud world of straight and LGBT
sex, exposed in an extensive full-color photo book
referencing Beijing’s underground culture scene.
The artist’s avowedly apolitical photos are the
outcome of an obsession with nudity, cosplay
and mundane scenarios blown up into avant-garde
dance stills. The images were summarily shot during
improvised meetups among friends comfortable with
subverting the hypocrisy of prim Chinese morality
with socialist characteristics.
Ren’s photos are not so much beautiful, polished
and professional as they are clever and shrewd.
The photographer’s imagination was constrained
only by the limits of yogic contortion, trompe-l’oeil
posturing (such as five buttocks forming a mountain
range) and the wan monotony of nude bodies. Ren
also drew from the tradition of erotic portraiture on
scrolls and in books that thrived in Ming- and Qing-
era China, a tradition that blossomed into Shunga
in Edo Japan in which exaggeration and sexual
humor were ever-present. Sadly, his compositions
also seem too contrived to be truly free and modern.
In this current age of online photo-sharing platforms