On February 24, the Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang (任航) tragically committed suicide at the age of 29. In his brief, six-year career, which began in an attempt to overcome his collegiate Beijing ennui, Ren had already exhibited in over 20 solo and 70 group art shows in cities ranging from Tokyo and Beijing to New York and Vienna. His photography primarily displayed his close friends in the nude, often enframed within scenes of smoggy urban desolation or embedded and entangled within natural flora. His creative disregard for normative constraints on imagistic representations of gender and sexuality, especially in the context of Chinese social conservatism, earned him praise from the LGBT community both at home and abroad. Chinese queer activist and filmmaker Fan Popo paid tribute to Ren: “You probably never know [sic]how many people you saved with your photos…Our golden era in Beijing had gone.” And before his sudden exit from the stage, Ren had only just begun to emerge in the American mainstream consciousness with a feature in Frank Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry magazine.
But in our grief over the loss of Ren and his visionary aesthetic we have failed to fully register his art’s deeper political significance. Aside from a couple of brief notifications of his passing from the likes of TIME and BBC, and a flurry of short remembrances from sympathetic friends and communities, there has been an uncomfortable silence — and a notable absence of reflective retrospectives and studies of the implications of Ren’s work. This leaves the broader public dangling in a confusing limbo: Ren’s work is posed as self-evidently important, but it’s not immediately clear why.
This silence in a sense feels like it’s resulted from a collective wondering: what is there to really say? Wasn’t Ren simply just another controversial artist who had been unjustly censored? The difficulty of understanding Ren’s art as something more meaningful is in part due to the restrictive ways by which Chinese art is received and interpreted in America.
On the one hand, we have high-profile artists like Ai Weiwei — who himself championed Ren and co-curated an exhibit with him in 2013 — who has regrettably been reduced to little more than an affirmation of American liberal values and a testament to the strength of American soft power subverting a totalitarian Chinese regime. We also have filmmaker Zhang Yimou who, though not directly related to American projections of liberalism in China, has abandoned the radicalism of his early films in favor of depoliticized directions of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics and blockbuster blunders like The Great Wall, thereby feeding into and confirming American orientalist images of what “China” is. And on the other hand, we have critically acclaimed artists like the filmmaker Jia Zhangke who has found little audience beyond art house circles in spite of the nearly unmatched historical power of his cinema in registering the marginalized experiences of postsocialist China.
Ren fell somewhere in between these two American paradigms of Chinese art as either confirmations of American political machinations or largely neglected altogether. This straddling of Ren’s work might explain the confusion over how to think through its meaning — not to mention the matter of fact that the sexual taboos Ren rebelled against firmly remain taboos in the American mind, as well. That is to say, the difficulty of speaking on Ren’s work comes as a result of the American habit of only recognizing a single mode of Chinese politics: that which can be appropriated into the language of rights, the rule of law, and multi-party democratic governance, or essentially nothing at all. Ren’s work holds a certain allure for Western audiences in part because of how it has been censored, but Ren escapes liberal frameworks by never speaking of his art’s suppression in the language of rights or democracy. As a result, there has been little serious consideration of the political significance in how his works open up an experiential, affective world of gender fluidity and open sexuality that deconstructs typical characterizations of Chinese cultural politics.
Image by Ren Hang via Flickr
My pictures’ politics have nothing to do with China. It’s Chinese politics that wants to interfere with my art.”
That Ren’s radicalism has been passed over with little more than a concerned whisper is at least in part due to a fatal misreading of Ren’s own elusive remarks on his work. When asked how his work should be interpreted politically, Ren cleverly responded: “My pictures’ politics have nothing to do with China. It’s Chinese politics that wants to interfere with my art.” But it would be absurd to take this as a cue to abstract Ren from his immediate context, for Ren’s photography carves a space for the erotic out from a larger world beyond the frames. Though his remark on the surface might appear to be a dismissal of politics, it is instead a configuration of his art’s politics as one that reveals and captures an active suppression that is otherwise concealed. He reveals that there is an interference in the first place, as opposed to a simple absence of Chinese sexuality.
Though this suppression is by no means limited to the censorship by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — social conservatism in China propagates a slew of phobias that suppress with their own force — the Chinese government’s policy toward the LGBT community is perhaps the most telling. The CCP is concerned as much with concealment as it is with containment. According to Stijn Deklerck, a Belgian grassroots LGBT activist in Beijing, the official policy is known as “san bu zhengce (‘three no’s’ policy): bu zhichi, bu fandui, bu tichang (no approval, no disapproval, no promotion). The idiom gives a fairly accurate picture of the current situation: it stresses the fact that the official position towards LGBTs in China is a ‘nonposition.’”
For Ren to have put forth his photographic disclosure of a concealed eroticism is therefore radically political in problematizing the duplicitous nature of the CCP’s tactic of rendering invisible the very existence of entire subsets of its population. In Ren’s own words, “Sex is a taboo in China. It’s not something that’s openly talked about. Why can’t we talk about sex in public? Are nude bodies shameful? We ought to be proud of our own bodies. Or at least cherish them. Our existence is worth valuing.”
Image by Ren Hang via Flickr
To bring out the significance of Ren’s politics of rendering visible a suppression in Chinese society, one would do well to refer to the political aesthetics of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Consistent throughout Rancière’s writings is an impulse to denaturalize falsely naturalized hierarchies in an aesthetic structuring of the world. He has called this structuring a “partition of the sensible,” in which the sensible encompasses the totality of one’s experiential world. This approach therefore makes our ways of sensing the world, through images, categories, and essentialized positions in society, intrinsically political. These hierarchical orderings, and the principles, norms, and values that reinforce and naturalize them, structure how we perceive ourselves, one another, and our world, thereby altering and shaping our perception of things in order to reinforce social hierarchies. As has been the case historically, the partition of the sensible determines what is and is not perceived or considered, or what is considered rational speech and what is disregarded as irrational noise. In these terms, both historical and ongoing struggles toward social justice in our world by slaves, workers, women, homosexuals, etc., have been struggles to attain public recognition of equality — to be counted just like everyone else.
True politics, according to Rancière, is therefore a disruption of a normalized partition of the sensible, and a matter of creating new subjects to be seen in a new way “through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, [but]whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience.” Ren’s photography is in this sense fundamentally political through its enunciation of the existence of Chinese sexuality and queerness, thereby disclosing a society “in its difference to itself” by falsifying what Deklerck aptly termed nonpositions; Ren pointed out that there is “a part that has no part,” an “excluded remainder” suspiciously hidden away, and declared its equal right to be seen.
In Ren’s own crude formulation, with his playful boyish personality, “I don’t want others having the impression that Chinese people are robots with no cocks or pussies. Or they do have sexual genitals but always keep them as some secret treasures. I want to say that our cocks and pussies are not embarrassing at all.” Ren’s art is therefore as simple as it is subversive: it beckons you to not forget Chinese sexuality behind all those ideological renderings of reality that would indeed rather have you forget it entirely. As one of Ren’s models, who goes by the name Lemon, phrased it, “[Ren’s] works expose phenomena and images that aren’t visible in daily life. They feel like they’re from a different world.”
But Ren’s world was not a different world. It’s our world, and Ren’s art made clear that it only feels so estranged because these private existences have had to be so firmly tucked away out of sight. The naked truth of these naked bodies, entangled with a nature as natural as their own skins and desires, was the unadulterated subject of Ren’s photography. When asked why he remained in China, Ren answered: “I shoot here because I love China. It’s my country. I was born here. The censorship makes me want to stay even more. Not being able to do what you want in your own country is such a tragic way to live. I just want to lead a quiet life.” Ren Hang didn’t fully live out this quiet life he hoped for, but in the process, he revealed just how political this hope can be.
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Ren Hang’s photography and poetry can be found here.
Truman Chen, a senior studying history, is the editor in chief of Stanford Political Journal.
This article appears in the May 2017 issue of Stanford Politics Magazine.