Ren Hang: For My Mother

Jet black hair, porcelain skin, bright red lips and fingernails; figures gazing intensely into the camera; young men and women posing acrobatically with bizarre props; animals and plants in the glaring light of the camera’s flash, situated in urban landscapes, private spaces, or in nature, among rice fields, lotus ponds, and cacti—Chinese artist 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’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.