Reviews artasiapacific.com^147such as Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat—and their
accessibility to online flirting and sexting—Ren’s printed
photos already seem dated, rooted in nostalgia. There
is a yearning behind the figures’ expressions and poses
that speak of youth’s desire for the next big thing.
Behind Ren’s in-your-face pics of friends and
lovers—pornographic by the laws of China and most
other jurisdictions—lay a sharp intelligence that
was aggravated by the photographer’s depression,
the crushing tides of which he documented in diary
entries that remain online posthumously. Here one
can read Ren’s sentimental, coy poems, perfect foils
for the untitled stills, and the confessional narratives
of his depression. These jottings reach beyond
individual suffering to describe a turbulent Kafkaesque
universe. For example, in one of his blog posts, dated
September 17, 2016, he stated: “For years, I have been
treating my own illness. I play two roles, doctor and
patient. Sometimes the doctor treats the patient;
at other times, the patient treats the doctor. In this
manner, life is reduced to a hospital setting, and I am
forever stuck in one hospital room or another. No one
else is allowed to enter, nor am I allowed to leave.”
Once privy to these thoughts, it becomes easier
to see how a young man who wrote this could produce
a series of photos that provoke giddy delight and
provide serious pleasure while dwelling on the human
condition. Ren’s portraits embody an empowered
generation: the trope of the oversexualization of
youths is diminished by the gamut of photos showing,
sometimes, post-adolescent men and women
compliant with, and complicit in, a fertile, pleasantly
perverse play of the imagination. These are amateur
actors in a charade, baring their genitals in postures
that sometimes just toe the S&M line. In the multiple
hands meticulously arrayed around genitals, like
molded decor on the ceiling of a prewar residence,
these very human cupids, putti, mermaids and mermen
reminded this former hippie of the acid-infused group
gropes of the 1960s. Indeed, these nubile Chinese have
spectacularly caught up with the West.
In Okinawa, Japan, where the frisson of foreignness
is never too far from the surface, the men and women
illustrated in Mao Ishikawa’s Red Flower: The Women of
Okinawa are more—if not better—dressed than the
subjects in Ren Hang’s retrospective, and much wiser.
And yet fun and sex, of a more serious and commercial
nature, is depicted. Topics of gender, race and conflict,
including the American defeat in the American-led
Vietnam War, are also present in the backgrounds of
these portraits.
The largely underestimated Ishikawa was born in
1953 in Okinawa, an island chain that was formerly
separated from Japan following the end of World
War II, and controlled by United States military
forces from 1945 to 1972. The female artist studied
photography briefly in Tokyo, before returning home
to Okinawa in the mid-1970s, determined to take
pictures of American military personnel based on
the island. Upon the recommendation of a friend,
she took a job undercover at a bar that happenedREN HANG
Edited by Dian Hanson
Published by Taschen, Cologne, 2016.
Softcover with color illustrations, 311 pages.
RED FLOWER: THE WOMEN OF OKINAWA
By Mao Ishikawa
Published by Session Press, New York, 2017.
Softcover with black-and-white
illustrations, 112 pages.
to be frequented by African-American soldiers.
As Ishikawa revealed in a recent interview with
i-D magazine, at that time Okinawa “was like a
U.S. colony, where troops could do whatever they
wanted.” Although American soldiers of color fought
on the same battlefields as the white soldiers, the
two groups segregated themselves when drinking,
socializing and whoring at night, in a not-so-distant
reflection of the identity politics currently fragmenting
the US. Ishikawa, then a 20-something bargirl
among 20-something GIs, fell in love over and over
and moved in with a black soldier, and her female
colleagues became her best friends.
Black-and-white and uncaptioned, the 80 photos
in this silkscreen-printed book, designed by New York-
based Studio Lin and published by Session Press, show
soldiers and their female companions at “work” and at
“play.” The tall, lanky black men are contrasted with
their diminutive consorts. The young offspring of these
liaisons show up in Ishikawa’s images of family and other
photo-album-like settings.
The artist takes a strong feminist, egalitarian view
of these relationships, reflecting how, she says, many
Okinawan women felt at the time. Mao recounted to
i-D magazine their collective questions: “What’s wrong
with loving black people? What’s wrong with working
at a bar? What’s wrong with enjoying sex?” stating
that neither the soldiers, “cheerful and self-assured
sometimes to the point of arrogance” nor the young
women who served them, cared “about how others
saw them.”
These are nostalgic snapshots, catching subjects
off guard on the beach, in bars, in bedrooms and
playgrounds, posing and primping and showing sass.
The girls proudly bare their breasts; one holds up
a marriage certificate, as if to encourage disbelief,
while interracial children, facing the camera close up,
provoke questions about their futures of encountering
racial discrimination, about which they are still too
young to understand.
You can almost smell the smoke, the beer, the
sweat and the makeup on a subtropical night on trashy
streets located on the small Pacific island. Flicking
through the pages, I wondered if maybe the notes of
a blues tune could serve as appropriate captions.
Red Flower is a historical memoir, on the surface
a portrait of a moment of peaceful respite from
the battles being fought around the world. Scratch the
surface and you’ll see how these images also reveal
how international encounters, no matter how random
or remote, cannot be free of the political undercurrents
that determine each person’s role in society, whether
dominant or subservient. Despite the universality of
these situations, the young Ishikawa’s own participation
and absolute immersion—blurring life and work—lends
the pictures a special poignancy, even four decades
after they were taken.
DON J. COHNSee our website for Arabic and Chinese versions of this article.