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\u2019 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, \u201cI don\u2019t really view my work as taboo, because I don\u2019t think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don\u2019t intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cthere are a lot of dicks \u2026 do you just like dicks?\u201d Ren responded, \u201cIt\u2019s not just dicks I\u2019m interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In the same piece, Hang also stated, \u201cGender isn\u2019t important when I\u2019m taking pictures, it only matters to me when I\u2019m having sex,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019 battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":19704,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[4517],"product_tag":[1647,6632,6121,1066],"class_list":["post-19711","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-photography-en","product_tag-erotica","product_tag-photographers","product_tag-photography","product_tag-portraits-en","pa_author_att-dian-hanson-en","pa_author_att-ren-hang-en","pa_cover-hardcover","pa_format-22-5-x-30-cm-en","pa_isbn-9783836562072-en","pa_language-eng-f-ger","pa_pages-312-en-2","pa_published-2017-01-20-en","pa_publisher-taschen-en-en","first","instock","sold-individually","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n