I recently discovered the photography of Ren Hang, a queer Chinese photographer who committed suicide tragically at the of 29 on February 24, 2017, in Beijing. Only weeks prior, Taschen had released a broad survey of his works drawn from an incredibly brief and meteoritic career: 90 international shows in six years.
There are many notable attributes of note to Ren’s work: his use of young mostly Chinese, often fair-skinned or extremely pale subjects of all genders; his preference for cold, clean, white backgrounds (though there are many outdoor shots far more occur in nature than traditional urban settings like places of business, etc.); his flash-heavy, overexposed look that has been popular since the 2000s, a raw and artsy lo-fi style you might say constitutes an ongoing deadpan aggression towards the static aesthetic of “pretty images”; and finally his obsession, aside from hospital whites and formal fabric blacks, for the color red. Red is not only the book’s handsome hardcover, what encloses over 300 plus pages: red is the fond, trenchant pop splash that accentuates flowers, lips, objects, smoke, furniture, and of course, the most signature aspect of his work, body parts: nipples, penises, vaginas, assholes, rims and lobes of flesh, etc.
Yes, by far what is most noted about Ren’s photography is his predilection for nude subjects: neither blandly tasteful nor straightforwardly pornographic. Ren’s models, which include mostly friends as collaborators, tend to be doing something in their nakedness. Preferably: pissing, laying down, sprawling on a floor, eating watermelon, fondling their organs, orifices, licking pits, sometimes adorned in animals (snakes, butterflies, and so on). When you read about such images, it’s easy to think the work is erotic and/or titillating, lewd, lascivious, “scandalous” even—in that familiar way. Yet nothing about Ren’s work strikes me as encountering nudity—the naked body, the trope of the nude form, the hinting wink of graphic sex, after all perhaps the oldest trope in all of global art history is bare flesh—in a simple way.
Since his book of photographs arrived two weeks ago, I have been teaching a multimedia creative writing class focused for the first half of the semester on photography. I’ve also been taking photographs fairly regularly of friends and strangers, a passion hobby that really started up last August when I decided on a whim to splurge on an incredibly expensive vintage Polaroid camera. I’ve been thinking about a few questions (some age old knots, conundrums, vexations) to art making:
Why as a culture do we seemingly censor, forbid, condemn images of nudity yet promulgate extreme images of violence, including sexual violence, so pervasively?
Is the defense of the nude in art related to or separate from the defense of erotic art, of pornography?
Can pornography (also) be art?
Is there something essentially queer regarding the tradition of, and the persistence of the tradition of, explicit images—particularly nude images, erotic art, pornography and pornographic-adjacent images?
Can queer (nude) photography still be radical in the age of ubiquitous pornographic proliferation, literally billions of free porn sites, not to mention X/Twitter, OnlyFans, as well as the constant whiff of it across social media, etc.? Shirtless gym selfies, which I adore, are also a kind of soft porn—no?
More often than not, does queer explicit art only strengthen capitalism, hypersexualization, the pathology of queer persons, the fetish of queer sexualities, genders, body parts?
And maybe most important or most challenging of all is this question: