Backgound information
"In 2016, Dries Roelens and Ren HANG composed a poetic selection of his photographic work as a tribute to his mother, for a soon-to-be-made publication. Three years later, In December 2019, 'For My Mother' was presented at the opening of Ren HANG’s posthumous solo show LOVE at C/O Berlin.
Content
In the photo volume 'For my Mother' analog photographs by Ren HANG 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.
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 - the photographs by Chinese artist Ren HANG are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. His gender-queer compositions are explicitly erotic but never pornographic." (© publisher's note, 2021)