Ren Hang. 我 母 親 - For my Mother
| Language: English |
| Cover: Hardcover |
Description:
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. Hang depicts the human body as
an abstract form, often in idiosyncratic arrangements and perspectives,
referencing and simultaneously overwriting well-known motifs and
traditions from Western art. He combines iconic images of William
Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia in a river surrounded by flowers; of Leda,
daughter of a Greek king, and the Swan; and of female nudes seen from
behind using a distinctive visual vocabulary that draws on abstraction,
Surrealism, Dada, and both historic and contemporary photography. The
artistic understanding revealed in his photographs is influenced by East
Asian philosophy and, in contrast to Western art, does not endeavor to
be original. His work instead continues a school tradition and strives
for timelessness; for Hang, as for many Chinese artists, questions of
authorship and of original versus copy only arise in confrontation with a
Western understanding of art. The juxtaposition of these views gives
rise to a new discourse on the forms and structures of collective and
pictorial memory. Ren Hang (b. 1987 in Changchun, China, d. 2017 in
Beijing) was a photographer and poet. In 2010 he received the Third
Annual Prize for Contemporary Art. His works have been shown in China
and Europe at venues including Foam—Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, MdbK in
Leipzig, Ostlicht—Galerie für Fotografie in Vienna (2017), and the
Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2019). He produced
numerous photobooks and published his photographs on his website,
Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr. His work has gained a growing
posthumous following and immense popularity worldwide. Up to his death
by suicide at the age of twenty-nine, Hang lived and worked in Beijing.Love, Ren Hang
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. Most of the
people portrayed are the artist’s friends, but they remain unnamed and
anonymous, and the images bear neither title nor place nor date.
Although carefully staged, they are infused with an element of
fleetingness and evanescence that is often the result of the artist’s
quick way of working. Ren Hang’s photographs are a rare ode to human
beings, their bodies, sexuality, beauty, and vulnerability.
C/O Berlin will be showing the exhibition Love, Ren Hang for
the first time in Germany. It is a comprehensive retrospective
including over 150 recent works by Ren Hang, one of the most important
contemporary photographers in China.
ISBN:
9789464002003
Specifications: