Ren Hang: For My Mother

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 — Ren Hang’s photographs are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. Ren Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in idiosyncratic arrangements and perspectives, combining iconic images of William Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia in a river; 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. 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.