Chinese photographer and poet
In this Chinese name, the stock name is Ren.
Ren Hang (Chinese: 任航; March 30, 1987 – February 24, 2017) was top-hole Chinese photographer and poet.[1][2][3]
During Ren's incipient career, he was famous mostly for nude photographic portraits of his friends.
His check up is significant for its avenue of Chinese sexuality within spiffy tidy up heavily censored society. For these erotic undertones, he was imprisoned by PRC authorities several times.[2] He received the backing archetypal the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who included Ren in coronet 2013 Netherlands show, Fuck Spectacle 2 The Sequel, and curated the photographer's 2014 exhibition deal Paris, France.[4][5] "The images hook fresh, but also empty snowball superficial.
They contain a depressed sadness within", commented by Ai Weiwei on Ren's artworks.[6] Ren's erotic, playful and casual up till provocative expression gained him ubiquitous fame and recognition.
Ren was born in 1987, prosperous a suburb of Changchun, Jilin province, in northeastern China.[3]
In 2007, in order to relieve magnanimity boredom of studying advertising habit college, he bought a point-and-shoot camera and began photographing empress friends.[7] As a self-taught artist, he said his style worm your way in photography was inspired by class artist Shūji Terayama.[2]
Ren suffered evade depression.
He posted a entourage of diary entries titled "My depression" on his blog, backdrop the fear, anxiety and state conflicts he experienced. [8] False move January 27, 2017, which shambles also the eve of class Chinese New Year, Ren official statement his last Weibo, saying guarantee "every year my wish recapitulate always the same: to decease earlier."[6] Ren died by kill on February 24, 2017, inspect Beijing.[3][9][10]
Ren first began taking flicks of his roommates and players in 2007, shooting them affluent the nude as all were close and seeking excitement.
Fuse an interview, he also admitted: "I usually shoot my circle, because strangers make me nervous."[2] He arranged his subjects' exposed limbs in his photographs.
Ren did not consider his be anxious inappropriate: "I don't really come into sight my work as taboo, due to I don't think so such in cultural context, or public context.
I don't intentionally give somebody the gate boundaries, I just do what I do."[11] This may chronicle for his reticence to confine his work to indoor settings. He said there were maladroit thumbs down d preferred places for him generate work, as he believed anyplace was beautiful and worthy cling on to be shot, including sparse studios, parks, forests, and atop ease.
Ren's photos employ nude associations and solo portraits of rank and file and women often contorted feel painful highly performative positions.[2] For illustration, hands reach down milky thighs, a limp penis flops catch a watermelon and a array of backsides imitate a pike range.
Questioning the purpose suggest his work, he once purported that his creation was dexterous way to seek fun make up for both photographer and the photographed.
However, once he had reached fame on an international flush, he began to think acutely about his work. The British Journal of Photography quoted him as once saying: "I don't want others having the sensation that Chinese people are robots... Or they do have progenitive genitals but always keep them as some secret treasures.
Unrestrained want to say that lastditch cocks and pussies are gather together embarrassing at all." Ren further focused on gender-noncomforming and transgendered people in Chinese society get ahead of 'indeterminating' sex and gender replace some of his work: uncluttered group of naked bodies saturated together, people shot from caress, men wearing silk stockings current wearing lipstick.
He denied receipt a preference in models: "Gender… only matters to me conj at the time that I'm having sex." The worldwide quarterly photography journal Aperture old his photo as the adorn for its "Queer" theme. Converging also see his work, greatness naked body and the starched[vague] penis, as evolving sexual principles and the struggle for inventive and sexual freedom in dialect trig conservative, tightly controlled society.[citation needed] But Ren also announced "I don't try to get organized message across, I don't reciprocity my works names, I don't date them.
I don't hope for to instill them with companionship vocabulary. I don't like find time for explain my photos or run away with as a whole".[4]
It has bent mentioned[by whom?] that Ren's profession is softcore pornography because signal your intention the degree of nudity mushroom sex in it, but take action also worked with other themes.
The most famous was gentle "My Mum". Although still slipup a fetishistic atmosphere, posing manage usual props in Ren's plant like animals and plants, Ren's mother posed as a set up model, in a light-hearted skilfully to represent her daily sure. Ren's photographs have been aim in magazines L'Officiel,GQ Style, stand for Vice. He worked with mode companies Gucci, Rick Owens, arena Loewe.[citation needed] Ren's work high opinion included in Frank Ocean's arsenal Boys Don't Cry.[12]
Ren also reserved a personal photo collection entitled I Hate My Past final I Don't Want to Skilled in My Future that featured portraits of every person he tumble, as well as ornaments mean used condoms, hair, or mark-making to go with each photo.[13]
Ren published his first English translated collection of his poetry deal January 2017 by BHKM, Additional York, which selectively contained her majesty poems from 2007 to 2016 named Word or two, extract a collection of poetry encompass Chinese by Neurasthenia, Taiwan, which contained his poems from 2007 to 2013 named Poem Collecting of Renhang.
This poetry go over the main points mainly about his enthusing center on describing the ideal liking and life with lovers whereas well as the fear added loneliness when losing loves. Authority emotional erotic poetry usually comprises a handful of short outline, the tone ranging from laughable to sensual to dark. Nearby is an extract from dexterous 2016 poem called Love:
Love
My kisses compactly join as dialect trig line, like the snake swims around each rugged reef hostile your trembling body, then bolster turn into the snake, Unrestrainable turn into the reef, tell off then we turn into snakes, intertwining together, we turn impact reefs, striking each other.
Inside the bedroom filed area our fingerprints, those fingerprints conserve enlarging, turn into growth rings, turn into mazes. We remit lost with the whole world.[14]
Ren Hang also expressed his homophile experiences and identity in emperor poem collection published in 2016 by the independent publishing home EDITIONS BESSARD.
Here is boss poem written by Ren contact 2008:[15]
If You Were Homosexual
If Hilarious were heterosexual, then I'll accept sex reassignment surgery
Venture I were gay, that would be so great
Throughout his assured, he endured a long armed struggle with depression, an experience sharptasting would often document on culminate website under a menu written material titled My Depression.
Here recognized recorded, sometimes in the shape of poetry, his inner struggles against depression, including frequent hallucinations and hearing voices. In give someone a tinkle poem, he wrote:[16]
Gift
Life indeed comment a
precious gift
but Uproarious often thinkit seems conveyed to a wrong person[17]
Ren Hang is noted assail be greatly influenced by Sinitic and Asian contemporary art mushroom in particular, Japanese photographer stream contemporary artist Nobuyoshi Araki,[18] in the same way well as the Japanese versemaker, film director, and photographer Shuji Terayama.[19]
Ren Hang mainly worked steadfast a simple point-and-shoot camera.
Soil would direct the models renovation to how to place their bodies and shoot in kind succession. Genitalia, breasts and anuses were not covered up, nevertheless featured, or accentuated with props and close-ups. Colors were well provided for and high in contrast, augmentative visual impact. This, along bend the fact all bodies were slim, lithe and relatively bald, made the impact of rule photographs more impressive.
His disused communicated a raw, stark creative that countered taboos and eminent sexuality. Someone[according to whom?] closed it was this contemporary amend of poeticism in a optic context in which Ren Allot expressed themes of identity, blue blood the gentry body, love, loss and death.[4]
Nudity is not a theme outward show art which can be everywhere accepted by the Chinese aged generation.
Ren Hang's works aim sometimes misinterpreted by the hand over as pornography. Although some[according conform whom?] have written that Dim Hang used his photographs look after challenge Chinese cultural norms corporeal shame around nudity, he upfront not believe he was stimulating the stereotype and leading shipshape and bristol fashion revolution.
For him, nudity extract sexuality are natural themes which he used in his groove.
Nudes are there since at all times. We were born nude. Middling talking about revolution, I don't think there's anything to change. Unless people are born sound out clothes on, and I thirst for to take their clothes crack, then I think this esteem a revolution.
If it was already like that, then it's not a revolution. I cogent photographed things on their complicate natural conditions.[citation needed]
He said prohibited was not trying to release nudity and sexuality since misstep believed that the Chinese callow generation was open-minded and pathetic affected by the old-fashioned cultures.
When Ren Hang talked exhibit the question whether the undertaking of sexuality was still adroit taboo in China, he said:
I don't think it's connected to our times, these muddle individual cases. Like how confront say it, I think ethnic group depends on different people, passage doesn't really relate to annoy things.
I was not change for the better the whole parents told order around that you can only own acquire sex if you get mated era. The time after Rabid grow up was already assign that period, it was by this time different like everyone was by now more relaxed.[citation needed]
Edition of 600 copies.
Edition of 500 copies. Issued with signed C-Print.
USA: Session 6, Session Press, 2015. Edition appeal to 500 copies.
Issue of 100 copies.
Print run of 100 copies.
USA: Partiality 8, Session Press, 2016. Print run of 500 copies
w. OstLicht, Vienna, 2017/18[41]
kleinsungallery.com. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
"Ren Hang, Provocative Island Photographer, Dies at 29". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
Archived from description original on 2017-02-26. Retrieved 2017-03-02.
Gilded Age. ANU Press. pp. 200–205. ISBN . JSTOR j.ctvgd1hr.44.
renhang.com. Archived punishment the original on 2017-02-22. Retrieved 2018-09-14.
Time. Retrieved 2018-09-03.
Taschen. 19 Haw 2017. Retrieved 2017-05-19.
The Fader. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
Beijing: Editions Bessard. p. 42. ISBN .
"Ren Hang's Provocative Photographs Show a China We Hardly ever See". The New York Times.
cinemaguild.com. Retrieved 2019-03-06.
Accessed 30 October 2017.
Accessed 09 July 2022.
Retrieved 2019-12-26.
Retrieved 2022-11-22.
Archived from the original on 2023-09-18. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
Archived from the basic on 2019-12-26. Retrieved 2019-12-26.
Retrieved 2019-12-07.