A Memoir For the Chinese Photography Phenomenon Ren Hang
By Adam Staley Groves
10 March, 2017
(originally published in T, The New York Times Magazine of Style, Singapore)
It is said poets are born and not made. For this reason, they feel lost to the world. Such characterisations have always haunted me. For one, it means poets live by the demands of their feelings and the will of the imagination. For another, it means they often straddle the limits of reality. Conversely their innate disposition and estrangement from common sense leads to work of unparalleled beauty. This has to be the case one makes for Ren Hang’s work; he was both a photographer and poet.
Hang’s scattered biographical details outline a motif of capture. If captured by feelings and compulsions of imaginative will, one irony about him would be that the essence of photographic skill is capture. Photography might have become a way to express his disposition as a poet quite sensitive to artistic form. Remarks made on method seem to underline the notion. He emphasised improvisation and claimed the idea would manifest only at the moment his models, often friends, stood before him. From there, with camera in hand, he composed the scene. One could imagine those early days on a Beijing rooftop to be undeniably potent. A scene where technological contrivance disintegrated and something beautiful emerged in what had, at least for the moment, vanished.
If in the past holding a camera was not without a level of contrivance, it may be we are less conscious of that today. That is, if technologies have truly become inseparable from common sense it means we are hardpressed to say anything about how they organise nearly every aspect of our lives. Yet in the images of Hang we see the beauty of the human form in ways that suggest an ironic harmony with technological order. In front of our eyes stands the beauty of the human form overcoming such conditioning. We therefore, are able to regard Hang’s minimalist approach as an innate talent, if not genius, for feeling the contemporary. After all, a central feature of artistic credibility is to detect and capture the effluence of a subtle yet natural force otherwise concealed by common sense.
We live in precarious times and if we struggle to articulate a vision we are well-served to turn to art. Captured over and over again in the images of Hang are fantastic human blossoms, unrivalled forms of geometric beauty. They help us to think the precarity of the present. That is, if we are headed toward what journalist Paul Mason calls “postcapitalism”, Hang’s images remark of a space after the collapse of global capitalism. The images nourish an otherwise vacant space; they provide for a collective vision yet to be defined. If Hang succeeded in his desire to present Chinese bodies as sexually healthy and not robotic, the images remark, with considerable strength, beyond the wearisome narratives of human decline and the rise of technological order. They remark of a new human being after capitalism. They remark of a world broken away from reactionary politics and repressive political regimes that otherwise seek to dominate human sexuality if only to maintain the power of a few.
Should the work of Ren Hang find itself the study of academics, his work would not concern poetry alone. Rapid urbanisation and demographic shifts in China, brought about by economic liberalisation, is sure to have contributed to shifts in the psyche that have led to an incoherence of traditional life. It is akin to “feminist technoscience” or the disintegrating distinction between science and how it is applied. It means that technological change reveals the potential of the human form, debasing identities. First, in Hang’s work, the asexual potency of human metamorphosis articulates a truth of gender fluidity. What is presented through prismatic arrangements of human bodies is a thinking of technological change by the body itself. The primary subject matter of Hang’s images represents the consistent remaking of the human form.
The human form is beautiful, still. The images speak, as Hang remarked, to the commonality that we are born naked, and that sex is healthy. Gender, he claimed, only mattered when he was having sex. This may be put up against the normalisation of pornographic brutality and the hateful musings of provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos peddling broken ideological wares at the dawn of Trumpism. If poets learn to situate themselves in reality by capturing imaginative will, joy and pleasure is invariably central to the work, it provides health for the traversals of the soul in an otherwise depraved world. It shows another world is possible, or present, if only effuse. The power of this potential world is that it need not contend directly with political ideology. We should take Hang’s own statements as true, he did not intend to attract capture by the state, though arrested several times by the Beijing police for violating public nudity laws. Hang’s images were also used for a means and ends beyond the rooftop, beyond his friends and his Beijing locale. The mastery of the imagination would lead him to be captured by the demands of the art and fashion industries. And so we are left to wonder how the stressors of career affected him. Finally, Ren Hang was held captive by a constant perturbance of depression. Much like the camera, this disposition was probably always at hand. Whatever the cause of his untimely death he was generous and open about what most likely captured his life. One cannot fault an artist if he or she does not resist recognition. Equally, we cannot fault them if they leave us too soon.