Make Love

shot by REN HANG The Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang, born in 1987, took up photography because he didn’t like studying marketing at university. He became a sensation once he started publishing his pictures online, circa 2008. He’s part of the generation from one-child Chinese families; his photography has come to represent the kind of freedom — personal, social, and sexual — young people of his ilk want, but which isn’t easy to get from the control society. Hang photographs friends and people who contact him, but with whom he gets along. He’s an improviser of situations; his specialty is to photograph both male and female subjects naked, in poses that he finds more fun than erotic, but which have a strong sexual content, certainly to Chinese eyes. He shoots with film rather than digitally, uses simple props, and sets up situations and poses that recall both comedy and…