Ren Hang, who took his life February 23, 2017, was an unlikely
rebel. Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression,
the 29-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the
forefront Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his
champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and
wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, "I don't really
view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural
context, or political context. I don't intentionally push
boundaries, I just do what I do." Why? Because his models, friends,
and in his last years, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the
trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing,
stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body
cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever entered his
mind at the moment. He denied his intentions were sexual, and there
is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the
urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013
interview VICE magazine asked, "there are a lot of dicks ... do you
just like dicks?" Ren responded, "It's not just dicks I'm
interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and
emotional way." True though that may be, the penises Ren
photographed were not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large,
making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece,
Hang also stated, "Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures,
it only matters to me when I'm having sex," making him a pioneer of
gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website
and Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all
produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70
group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as
Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and
yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print
runs, that now sell for up to $ 600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only
international collection, covering his entire career, with
well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men,
women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace
remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his
long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.
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