Ren Hang

The naked body is the most photographed subject on earth and one of the hardest to make new. Centuries of art history press down on it; so does an ocean of pornography. Point a camera at bare skin and the picture almost always tips into one of those two ditches, solemn or leering, before the shutter even fires. Ren Hang spent a short, prolific career refusing both, and the pictures he made in that refusal still look like almost nothing else.

He photographed his friends, never professional models, usually nude, in compositions that treat the body as one bright element among many. A goldfish balanced on a forehead, a peacock clutched against a chest, a cigarette burning between two sets of toes, a cluster of limbs stacked into a single impossible knot: the images run on wit as much as on skin. The flash is hard and frontal, the color pushed until lips and painted nails seem to vibrate. Nothing is retouched into fantasy. The rooftops of Beijing sit plainly behind it all, ordinary and enormous.

For all the spontaneity, the compositions are exact. He works like a graphic designer who happens to use human limbs, arranging elbows and knees and spines into rigorous symmetries, then breaking each one with a single deliberate wrong note. The snapshot surface is a decoy. Look longer and the discipline shows: the negative space measured, the color blocked, the eye walked around the frame on a fixed path.

Certain motifs recur like a private vocabulary. Water and mirrors double the body and confuse up with down. Animals arrive as live props, a peacock or a snake or a tank of goldfish, injecting a jolt of the uncontrollable into an otherwise controlled frame. Height returns constantly, friends perched on ledges high above the city, the danger real enough to sharpen every picture. The vocabulary is small, and he wrings enormous variety from it.

None of this protected him at home. Chinese authorities repeatedly seized his work, shut his shows, and detained him; abroad, the same pictures made him a sensation, championed by Ai Weiwei. A skeptic can reasonably ask whether the notoriety outran the art, whether shock did the work that composition should have. It is a fair challenge, and the volume answers it by accumulation. Page after page, the jokes deepen into something tender, and the provocation reveals a maker far more interested in freedom than in scandal.

The pictures also quietly teach a lesson about working with people who are not models. Everyone here is a friend, and the intimacy shows in how far they will go for him, folding into positions that require total trust in the person behind the camera. That trust is a photographer's real equipment, more decisive than any lens. The bodies relax into absurd arrangements because the room was safe, and the safety is visible in the results.

He insisted he was not making political art. He said he did not think about his pictures in cultural or political terms at all, that he simply photographed bodies the way they exist in the world, as ordinary as trees. The regime disagreed, which is its own kind of proof about where the provocation actually lived. He also wrote poetry and kept a blog about his depression, and in February 2017, at twenty-nine, he took his own life. What he left is slim and concentrated, a whole sensibility delivered at speed.

As an object, the TASCHEN edition sequences the work smartly, letting the single-figure studies breathe between the crowded, acrobatic set pieces so the rhythm never tires. The reproduction serves the color, which is the entire game; those synthetic reds and greens need saturation to land, and they get it. It is a compact, generous survey of an output cut short, and it never pads.

Return to the problem the naked body sets every photographer, solemn on one side, leering on the other. His answer was a third option nobody had quite drawn before: the body as a bright, funny, weightless thing, staged with a peacock and shot in a stairwell, taken seriously precisely because it is not taken solemnly. He found a route between the two ditches and drove it at full speed for as long as he had.