Ren Hang Hides Nothing

Looking at Ren Hang’s photographs feels like reading Mian Mian’s early fiction—Candy, her debut novel about Shanghai’s underground—that same intimate window into the secret life of Chinese youth, the existence the government would prefer to pretend doesn’t happen: young bodies arranged in ways that read as both tender and anarchic, a nakedness that is as much about refusal as exposure. Ren Hang lives and works in Beijing. His work is regularly censored.

I like nudity, I like the direct, open way, he says. Why should we hide our bodies? Why should we hide anything? His images have shown in galleries in Copenhagen, Rome, and Frankfurt, and further. On his website he writes openly about the depression that has followed him for years—everyone knows him, everyone stares at him, everyone talks about him, and at certain points he can no longer hold it. He writes this plainly, without self-pity, which makes it harder rather than easier to read.

For Chinese youth culture, Ren Hang is the one who walked out first—who refused to be shaped by a prudish dictatorship that would rather these images not exist. His exhibitions can be shut down at any moment. His books can be confiscated tomorrow. He gives Chinese art a face the rest of the world actually wants to see, which is its own kind of dangerous. He doesn’t seem afraid of that. It shows in every photograph.