The Sozzani Foundation presents “ Ren Hang, photography ” for the first time in Milan. With over eighty photographs, videos, books and magazines, the retrospective is dedicated to one of the most important photographers of contemporary China, who tragically died in 2017 at the age of only twenty-nine. Ren Hang's photography is a hymn to man, his body, sexuality, beauty and vulnerability. His images relate the feelings, desires, fears and loneliness of the younger generations in China in an almost ironic way, through their corporeality. The nude is at the center of his work because, says Ren: “human beings come into the world naked, so the naked body represents the original version of people. By photographing the nudes, one captures the most real and authentic existence ”.

Ren Hang was born in 1987 in Changchun, Jilin province, Manchuria, and began self-taught photography from the early years of high school. At seventeen he moved to Beijing where he studied advertising. He leaves the university early to devote himself to photography. He shoots with small compact 35mm cameras, handy and inexpensive, which he confesses to habitually breaking. He makes an almost obsessive use of it, shooting incessantly. His roommate and friends are his first subjects, but he soon receives more and more requests from his peers who are admirers who offer themselves as role models. Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in unexpected compositions and perspectives, superimposing well-known motifs and traditions of Western art.