August

August belongs to a run of monthly zines Ren Hang self-published through 2016, each one a snapshot of a single month spent shooting the bodies of friends and collaborators.

The photographs, all made in Tokyo in August 2016, show nude figures alone or in small groups, staged with the flat flash light and blunt, matter-of-fact framing that runs through Ren Hang's work. The artist described the year-long series simply as a shooting plan about survival and love. This copy is a first-edition softcover booklet of 48 pages from an edition of 100, signed by the photographer.

Ren Hang (1987-2017) was a Beijing-based photographer and poet whose nude portraits of young Chinese men and women, made outside any studio system and often on rooftops or in domestic interiors, drew both international acclaim and repeated censorship at home. The monthly zines of 2016, of which August is one, were made in the final year of his life alongside larger monographs such as Nude and Athens Love.