Capricious 88 presents a solo show of new work by Chinese photographer Ren Hang hose work deals directly with queerness and sexuality, the interaction of female and male bodies, and a natural world shifting under the influence of human civilization. In these new works (all 2014), Hang, who frequently explores how natural objects relate to the body, examines the formal situations that emerge between the two, focusing in particular on the complex optics of camouflage as both the human and natural world as they vanish into one another. In these photographs, flowers are stuffed into orifices, used to cover the eyes, or conceal the entire body.
Hang’s human subjects—Chinese youth—tessellate into one another and into landscape, creating works that simultaneously image brutality and tenderness, desire and ambivalence, questioning the various divisions that demarcate lovers and friends. In many of Hang’s photographs, limbs, torsos, and faces double and triple, complicating the formal properties of the nude by examining the natural patterns in how those bodies interact. Sorting through the sensual ambiguities of
his subjects’ bodies, Hang explores contemporary gender dynamics in order to highlight the social complexities that define us.
At the heart of this work lies the question of the camera’s relationship to the representation of the human figure, specifically of bodies that lie outside of the normative boundaries of gender and sexual identity, an extraordinarily rich but vexed conceptual territory in contemporary China, where state media often prohibits such representations. Currently based in Beijing, Hang is forbidden by the Chinese government from showing his work in that country. His first solo show in the U.S., 2014, was at Capricious 88 in March.
FESTIVAL
Paris Photo Los Angeles
May 1st – 3rd, 2015
Capricious 88
Paramount Pictures Studios
Los Angeles
780 N. Gower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90038
United States
