Athens Love

Athens Love is Ren Hang's second monograph, gathering photographs he made in Greece in April 2015 during a residency at Occupy Atopos, the open-studio program curated by Vassilis Zidianakis in Athens and Attica.

The pictures follow friends through beaches, forests, cliffs, streets, and apartments, made outside Hang's native China, where his work was routinely censored. Away from that pressure, the photographs take on a looser, more playful register: diaristic snapshots sit next to the stylized nudes that had already made him one of the most closely watched photographers of his generation. Session Press published the book as a hardcover edition of 500 to coincide with the exhibition of the same name at Klein Sun Gallery in New York, March 24 through April 30, 2016.

Athens Love followed Hang's first book, New Love (Session Press, 2015), and continued the serial, place-based format he used through his short career. Hang died in February 2017 at 29; his slim body of self-published and small-press books remains the primary record of his work.