Ren Hang: For My Mother

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 — Ren Hang’s photographs are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. Ren Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in id...