ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Chinese queer artist Ren Hang's photography. I see photos and the act of taking photos as forms of performance as they present human bodies and the world in a designed, dramatic and theatrical manner. Ren's works capture and document a largely underground and fast 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 governance and neoliberal capture. Drawing on Chinese and Western philosophical traditions, including the Daoist notion of ziran and the Deleuzian concepts of the body and affect, I argue that Ren's artworks champion a non-heteronormative and non-anthropocentric way of thinking, and that they index queer as a radical political stance and a free style of life.
