Ren Hang, Ren Hang, ed. Dian Hanson (Köln: Taschen, 2017), 312 pp, ISBN 9783836562072, hardcover.
It’s both exhilarating and unnerving to hold in my hands for the first time a book of the late Chinese photographer-poet Ren Hang. Images that used to be mediated by a computer screen reality now materialise in print. Naked bodies—Ren’s primary subject matter presented in the book—invite caressing, by fingertips brushing against cellulose sheets when turning the pages.
Originally intended to be the first international collection of Ren Hang’s photographic works to celebrate his hitherto worldwide fame, the book, tersely named after the photographer, ended up being Taschen’s review of Ren’s legacy when he ended his life shortly after the collection’s first publication. Weighing nearly two kilograms, spanning more than 300 pages, and clothed in a vibrantly red fabric hard cover, Ren Hang resists being taken lightly. As much as red is a colour of passionate and seductive love, it is also a sign for danger and violence—perhaps a foreshadowing of how reading the book might be analogous to tasting the forbidden fruit. Indeed, the cover design subversively evokes China’s flag, although its familiar yellow star is here replaced by an image of the photographer’s long-time partner fondling his own armpit (see Fig 1).
Figure 1. Taschen’s Ren Hang by a window sill, by the author, May 29, 2021.
Preposterous though this may seem, irreverence has always been perceived as a cornerstone of Ren’s practice. In the eyes of a repressive government, his photographic works inevitably transgress the prevailing moral code; naturally, they had led to several arrests during his 10-year career (Genova, "Ren Hang: Chinese Photographer Dead at 29"). The publisher Taschen contextualises Ren’s photographic misdeeds from the standpoint of an outsider looking into a domestic affair. In this view, China is associated with sexual conservatism and Ren with its antithesis. Ren Hang makes clear its mission: to showcase to an international audience brazen Chinese youths in full embrace of their sexuality and perversion. “I don’t want others to have the impression that Chinese people are robots with no cocks or pussies, or they do have sexual genitals but always keep them as some secret treasures. I want to say that our cocks and pussies are not embarrassing at all,” says Ren, who is quoted in the introductory text (Ren 8).
The book is a deluge of images—an externalisation of Ren’s notion of beauty captured with an analogue camera. He shoots lanky, almost always unclothed Chinese youths with jet-black hair—often long in the case of girls and cut short with boys—and immaculate pale skin illuminated by direct flash. Facing the camera are outstretched vulvas and erect penises, adorned with cigarettes (52) and lipstick smears (53). Flowers and animals are recurrent motifs, sometimes accompanied by profoundly disturbing affects: thorny rose stalks lie haphazardly across exposed groins of two bodies (1), and an octopus not only wraps around a model’s head but is also braided with her hair (see Fig 2).
Figure 2. Photograph of pages 58-59 of Ren Hang, by the author, in Ren Hang, edited by Dian Hanson, Taschen, 2017.
Many photos render the viewer a voyeur of passionate love making, taking place on a rooftop overlooking an anonymous urban backdrop (104–5), in nature surrounded by lush greeneries or barren tree trunks (84), or even in a fish tank incongruously situated in a hotel room (see Fig 3). Moments of intimacy range from couples embracing each other and locking lips (107), to more fetishistic acts like feet-licking (183) and pissing at each other (50–1). Some snapshots are led by a concern with formal beauty: the heads and arms of a group of women criss-cross in compliance with the radial geometry of a star (109), while in another, a man crouches in the centre of the frame, his eyes hidden behind two symmetrically placed penises (78). At times, models are reduced to their body parts, composed into uncanny sculptures—torsos and buttocks lining up one after another, suggestive of undulating sands (see Fig 4), or bodies draping over a tree branch, their slim legs dangling towards the viewer and spreading just wide enough to offer an unobstructed view of their privates (190).
Figure 3. Photograph of pages 178-179 of Ren Hang, by the author, in Ren Hang, edited by Dian Hanson, Taschen, 2017.
Figure 4. Photograph of pages 90-91 of Ren Hang, by the author, in Ren Hang, edited by Dian Hanson, Taschen, 2017.
Understandably, these images should not be taken to be a truthful representation of Chinese youths, for they encompass only a fraction of the population who are unafraid, or maybe foolish enough, to publicly display what is generally kept private. Still, they constitute an important reflection upon our knowledge of Asian sexuality. In contemporary times, the capacity to talk openly about sex and the relative freedom of sexual expression are often regarded as a Euro-American way of life (Clark 218–20). Meanwhile, Asian cultures generally relegate any matter related to sex to the realm of taboos and perversion (Leong 20; Swaroopini, "Sexuality Education in ASEAN"). In a way that puts us in mind of Edward Said’s own critique of Orientalism (2), the predominant Western imagination conceives Asian sexuality as subservient: Asian men are seen as scrawny, sexually inept individuals in relation to hunky, masculine white men (Han 84–5), while Asian women inhabit an exotic space of sexual fantasy (Woan 277–8).
Ren’s photographs untangle Asian sexuality from this web of signification. As much as they are an indulgence for the artist, his friends, and his community, they are also proof that Asians of any gender and sexual orientation own their sexuality. Their erotic desires and carnal pleasures are for them—and them alone - to embrace; whether or not these images transgress societal moral codes or serve someone else’s fantasies is secondary to the modes of sexual liberation that they celebrate
It should be cautioned that the choice to see Ren’s primary subjects—Chinese youths—as Asians can be problematic. To use the term “Asian” is to conflate a myriad of distinctive identities, such as East Asian, South Asian, Western-born Asians, to name a few, each of which has its own nuances and histories. To my knowledge, Ren never spoke of Asians—only of his countrymen. In a strict sense, this means that Ren’s images can only be said to concern Chinese sexuality, or more precisely a particular slice of it, rather than something as broad as the entire Asian populace. My usage of the term, then, necessarily operates in a limited sense to identify members of Ren’s audience who might see in his own photographs snippets of their own sexuality.
For them, Ren’s images offer a wealth of sensual bodies that resemble their own more than those captured by the likes of Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson. They possibly also find in Ren’s inventive use of exotic animals and backdrops a distinctive flavour rooted in a locale closer to home than the land of Guy Bourdin and Robert Mapplethorpe. Even within the terrain of Asian sexuality, the reality is so vast and resistant to a monolithic description of canonical artists, that Ren’s gestures of profanity, when fixed on visual records, merely contribute to an expanded field of knowledge. More than for white men to gaze upon, it’s a humble resource for Asian readers to affirm their sexual expression, find an avenue to externalise an inner self, or simply find normalcy amid a purported “abnormal”.
Without a doubt, the photobook achieves what it sets out to do: to debunk myths about Chinese, and by extension Asian, sexuality. But I still have my reservations about the veracity of its depiction of Ren Hang as an artist. This is not to say that the shamelessness and gross indecency misrepresent the photographer; in fact, he preferred pornography to eroticism as a description of his works. What troubles me is the rather one-dimensional portrayal of Ren, which becomes apparent when the Taschen edition is compared to the artist’s monthly self-published monographs in 2016. For instance, the June issue is a series of diptychs that pair up a photo of choppy waters with a photo of one or two naked female models inhabiting the same landscape at night (Chladek, "June"); the November issue prints only on one page of every spread, interweaving a male subject, fully clothed for the most part, with banal shots of nature—chicken feathers shed on the ground or a baby-blue sky just cloudy enough to reflect some brilliant sun rays (Chladek, "November").
These self-publications suggest a noticeably different Ren Hang, someone with very decisive creative direction about the viewing journey as well as layered thematic concerns. This stands in stark contrast with the book, which by comparison seems to sensationalise rather than present a nuanced characterisation of the photographer’s practice. It is thus timely to revisit the idea of Ren Hang as an author. Any of his followers would know that it was never his intention to make a political statement. What he found beautiful, he shot obsessively. “The way I see it, bodies are pre-existing regardless of whether I photograph them or not. They’re also part of the natural world,” responded Ren to a question about his interests in the subject matter (Huang, "World of Ren Hang"). More often than not, beauty in his private realm of existence - naked porcelain bodies with human genitals on full display—is never left as it is, but is instead always moralised. “My pictures’ politics have nothing to do with China. It’s Chinese politics that wants to interfere with my art,” asserted the photographer (Kane, "Ren Hang on Nature"). In other words, for Ren, naked bodies are an end in themselves, rather than a means to political opposition.
For someone who has not seen Ren’s work before, Taschen’s presentation might suffice as an introduction to his oeuvre. But, to a critical eye familiar with the artist’s practice, the book’s editorial posturing raises questions: reducing Ren's practice to a pushback against China's sexual conservatism hardly bears testimony to the subtleties of his work. In fact, by playing up sensationalist aspects of Ren's photography, the Taschen monograph unfortunately ends up further racialising its subjects: the models within its pages are registered as Chinese or Asian before they are seen as sexualised bodies. Ren once mentioned in an interview, “If I was born in America, I would like American models. If I was born in England, I would pick English models.” (Kane, "Ren Hang on Nature") This could reasonably imply that, for Ren, humans have a body and a sexuality before having a race or living in a society. In other words, his creative preoccupations, whether or not innate or acquired through socialisation and habituation, primarily concern human bodies and sexuality, while race and social life take an auxiliary role. Taschen’s politicised reading of Ren Hang therefore seems willfully obtuse, for it overstates a racial politics Ren professedly does not claim for his own work. The somewhat aggravating result is that Ren Hang ends up accosted by a surreptitiously Orientalist gaze that continues to see Asian bodies as exotically Other.
Now that Ren is dead, he has no way to speak for himself. But maybe this is trivial. He never seemed to mind how curators selected and presented his works for exhibitions. So long as his people—the youths of China, his followers, or simply his friends and those whom he once loved—see him and relish his creations, then, nothing else really matters. If anything at all.
A computer science student by day and a writer by night, Dan writes about anything visual, having contributed at SGIFF, SINdie—a local editorial platform for Southeast Asian cinema—and Matca—a Vietnam-based online journal on photography. Sometimes he partakes in the practice of visual arts and has had his works featured in group exhibitions at Objectifs and The Substation.
Works Cited
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https://josefchladek.com/book/ren_hang_-_june.
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Han, Chong-suk. “Being an Oriental, I Could Never Be Completely a Man: Gay Asian Men and the
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Huang, Yanyan. “Introducing the World of Ren Hang.” Purple, 2021. Accessed August 7, 2021.
https://purple.fr/magazine/ss-2014-issue-21/introducing-the-world-of-ren-hang/.
Kane, Ashleigh. “Ren Hang on Nature, Nudity and Censorship.” Dazed. Dazed, March 10, 2015.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/24031/1/ren-hang-on-nature-nudity-and-politics.
Leong, Laurence Wai-Teng. “Asian Sexuality or Singapore Exceptionalism?” Liverpool Law Review 33, no. 1
(2012): 11–26. Accessed August 7, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10991-012-9106-8.
Nair, Swaroopini. “Addressing the Stigma of Sexuality Education in ASEAN.” The ASEAN Post. The ASEAN
Post, October 24, 2017. https://theaseanpost.com/article/addressing-stigma-sexuality-education-
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Said, Edward W. “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 1–15. Accessed August 7, 2021,
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Woan, Sunny. “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence.” Washington and
Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 14, no. 2 (2008): 275–302. Accessed August 7, 2021.
https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=crsj.
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