Ren Hang

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…