Red lips and nails; black hair; bare skin. The markers of Ren Hang’s photography are distinctive enough to be immediately recognizable, shot most frequently at night with a bold flash. Surrealism and sexuality come together in the Chinese artist’s work, whose analogue photography capture an erotic freedom of the body that goes beyond gender. “I don’t want others having the impression that Chinese people are robots with no cocks or pussies,” he once declared. He made no secret of his struggles with depression and mental health, and took his own life in 2017 at the age of twenty-nine. His work is now being shown for the first time in Germany, at C/O Berlin, where his fiercely imaginative imagery will be on display in a major retrospective; featuring over 150 works, it is a celebration of a creative life and truly original vision.
