March

A self-published photobook by the Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang, part of a year-long project of monthly volumes that stands among the most personal work of his brief career.

In 2016 Ren Hang set out to publish a small softcover book every month, an informal diary running alongside his more widely exhibited series. March, forty pages in an edition of 100 copies, gathers images shot that month in New York and Hong Kong: the nude and semi-nude bodies of friends and lovers set against plain interiors, rendered in the flat, saturated color and deadpan framing that mark his work throughout the series. Ren described the project simply as being about survival and love.

Ren Hang (1987-2017) worked outside China's official art system for his entire career, photographing nudity, gender, and homosexuality in a context where such images could not be publicly exhibited at home. The monthly books of 2016, made the year before his death, sit alongside better-known volumes like Republic and Athens Love as part of a body of work built largely through self-publishing and international gallery shows rather than commercial distribution.