The news of the death of Ren Hang (任航), a leading photographer of his generation, was met with widespread disbelief in China and around the world on Friday, as art insider and aficionados alike took to Weibo and Twitter to mourn his loss.
The controversial and subversive provocateur is understood to have committed suicide by jumping off a building while in Berlin on Friday morning. He would have turned 30 in March.
Having struggled with debilitating depression for years, Ren turned to poetry to chronicle his battle with the disease. He had often foreshadowed his own death in postings on social media.
“Every year, my wish remains the same: to die earlier,” Ren wrote in a recent post on his Weibo account less than a month ago. “I hope this year, it can become reality.”
In another post in 2014, Ren wrote about the time he almost jumped out from the window of his friend’s apartment.

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“People suffering from depression may not exhibit any obvious symptoms, but if you find a friend down with depression, you need to spend more time with them and make the effort to call them more frequently, because you never know when it will strike,” he wrote. “One minute I might be thinking the whole world is smiling at me, and the next, I might feel they all want to stab me.”
Having left his native Changchun for Beijing at the age of 17 to study marketing, Ren soon figured that business wasn’t his cup of tea. To kill boredom, he bought himself a point-and-shoot film camera and taught himself to use it.
Over the years, he would become known for his sexually-charged, often explicit photographs of naked Chinese youths, mostly his friends. But while his works travelled the world in solo exhibitions, they have rarely been shown in China uncensored.

“My pictures discuss survival,” Ren once said about his body of work. “I don’t want to isolate human being from animals or plants, and I don’t want others to have the impression that Chinese people are robots with no cocks or pussies, or that they do have sexual genitals but always keep them as some secret treasures. What I want to say is that our cocks and pussies are not embarrassing at all.”
Police in Beijing, where the photographer was based, often shut down his shows on charges that his work was pornographic. On numerous occasions, Ren also reported being detained by police in the middle of his photo shoots and his cameras confiscated.
Yet, he decided to stay put in the capital and to soldier on. “I shoot here because I love China. It’s my country. I was born here,” he said in a documentary produced by Vice Japan. “The censorship makes me want to stay even more. Not being able to do what you want in your own country is such a tragic way to live.”
“I just want to lead a quiet life,” he went on. “But in China, I’m not allowed to do that.”
Two solo exhibitions of Ren Hang’s photography are currently running at the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam, and the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm.