Ren Hang : for my mother.

"Jet black hair, porcelain skin, bright red lips and fingernails; figures gazing intensely into the camera; young men and women posing acrobatically with bizarre props; animals and plants in the glaring light of the camera's flash, situated in urban landscapes, private spaces, or in nature, among rice fields, lotus ponds, and cacti - Chinese artist Ren Hang's photographs are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. His gender-queer compositions are explicitly erotic but never pornographic. Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in idiosyncratic arrangements and perspectives, referencing and simultaneously overwriting well-known motifs and traditions from Western art. He combines iconic images of William Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia in a river surrounded by flowers; of Leda, daughter of a Greek king, and the Swan; and of female nudes seen from behind using a distinctive visual vocabulary that draws on abstraction, Surrealism, Dada, and both historic and contemporary photography. The artistic understanding revealed in his photographs is influenced by East Asian philosophy and, in contrast to Western art, does not endeavor to be original. His work instead continues a school tradition and strives for timelessness; for Hang, as for many Chinese artists, questions of authorship and of original versus copy only arise in confrontation with a Western understanding of art. The juxtaposition of these views gives rise to a new discourse on the forms and structures of collective and pictorial memory."--From publisher's website.