A Queer Way of Life: Ren Hang’s Photography

This article focuses on queer representations in Ren’s artworks gathered from the private collections of his friends. In doing so, I hope to expand on the existing critique of heteronormative essentialism in contemporary art and popular culture in China. Ren’s works capture, and vividly document, a largely underground and now disappearing, queer subculture in urban China at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such a subculture is worth remembering, as we are increasingly living with reified and commodified gender and sexual identities under state censorship and neoliberal capture