I've Got a Little Problem dir. by Ximing Zhang (review)

Filmed months before Chinese photographer Ren Hang's heartbreaking suicide in 2017, Ximing Zhang's documentary short feature I've Got A Little Problem follows Hang's process of creating and exhibiting provocative photography under the eye of a repressive and restrictive government. Although Zhang's title references Hang's sly understatement regarding his depression, the documentary builds its case for a host of other, not-so-little problems Hang faces as he makes his work. The film, for instance, documents the various subversions Hang undertakes under the watchful eye of Chinese authorities to materialize his aesthetic, ideological stance—even one seemingly protected such as the nude in art.

Hang made a career out of shooting nude portraits of his friends and fans with his point-and-click Minolta, treating their bodies as "pliable tools."¹ Influenced by the work of Japanese avant-garde director and photographer, Shuji Terayama, and photographers Nobuyoshi Araki and Terry Richardson, Hang produced work that was at once derided as pornography in China even as it was lauded internationally as art. Such duality is embedded in Zhang's film, as it shifts among the dangerous and endangered spaces of making, developing, and exhibiting his work. With the quickened pace of someone forever looking over their shoulder, the filmmaker interweaves scenes of Hang and friends talking and strategizing with photoshoots in cramped interiors and urban rooftops. Underscored by an equal pulse of threat and urgency, the film braids consultations with Hang's legal advisor with exhibition footage and excerpts from Hang's performance art—all in defense of the artist's right to produce and exhibit work.

In Zhang's film, Hang defends his interest in the naked body as the subject of his work, even amid the cultural taboos against nudity in China. When his legal advisor warns him of China's law against group licentiousness, Hang responds, "What is group licentiousness? Making love in public? Having oral sex? I've done neither. I am just presenting nudes in the open air."

To Zhang's credit, the film allows an unencumbered, "open air" entry into Hang's process, where he showcases the body not solely in portraiture, but as it intersects with the realms of the natural, urban, erotic, animal, and synthetic. Although Zhang affords due time to the process, he devotes less to the substance and breadth of Hang's work. Images scroll by at breakneck speed in the film, and the most provocative of Hang's photos, featuring genitalia adorned, distorted, or in various states of arousal, remain unseen. A recent consolidation of Hang's work by Taschen, a thick volume of over 300 pages,² offers the latitude of ambition of Hang's portraits, portraits that feature bodies consuming and consumed, in states of stimulation and placidity—all with Hang's visual markers of poreless, pale skin, thick strokes of jet-black hair, and the cherry-red lipstick and nail polish adorning his female models. In comparison to Hang's provocative oeuvre of the body, the film and the artwork it features are relatively timid.

Still, Zhang's work demonstrates moments of artistry with an acute understanding of cinematic and digital formats of representation, as the filmmaker employs a constellation of aspect ratio formats, such as 1:1, 4:3, 21:9, to frame each scene. With his ever-shifting frame, Zhang reminds the viewer how artists today toggle among print, exhibition, cinematic, television, and digital spaces. Zhang even features the additional framing devise of the circle to suggest psychological interiority, a visual echo of the circularity of thought of both the artist and one afflicted with the titular "little problem" of depression.

For those working with undergraduates, the film offers a nexus of contemporary sociopolitical phenomena among the government, the artist, and the public. How, for example, can global artists working within oppressive regimes use digital media as a form of visual samizdat? How does the online circulation of imagery support or subvert the safety of the artist? How...