Ren Hang’s Untitled (2015): Queer Eco-Intertwinement in Contemporary Chinese Photography

Abstract

In Ren Hang’s photograph Untitled (2015), a lotus-human chimera relaxes in a murky pond, prompting viewers to rethink the hybrid nature of their relationship with the natural world amidst human-driven climate change. The photograph centers on a figure that disrupts dominant cultural narratives, as the human-plant “monster” remains indifferent to normative scripts of sex, gender, progress, and reproduction. Through this queer, nonhuman metamorphosis, the camera stages a body that is both human and vegetal, entwined with the lotus and pond as the lotus’s stem and root supporting its blossom. This ecological intertwinement raises questions about the photograph’s genre. Is Untitled a portrait because it depicts a human figure, or a landscape because it centers the pond ecosystem? Ren exploits this tension to challenge assumptions of human activity versus nonhuman passivity. The unmoving human form contrasts with the animated shimmer of water droplets, inviting viewers to attend to the liveliness of the nonhuman world. By presenting the lotus as both human and plant, and as belonging to ecosystems above and below the water, the photograph reflects the duality of human existence and its deep enmeshment within surrounding habitats. Yet this entanglement also exposes a paradox: we risk harming ourselves by damaging the ecological “roots” that sustain us. In this sense, Untitled uses its hybrid to evoke the precarious position of humans amidst global climate change, inviting viewers to generatively inhabit the contradictions of their time.