Photography Ren first began taking pictures of his roommates and friends in 2007, shooting them in the nude as all were close and seeking excitement. In an interview, he also admitted: "I usually shoot my friends, because strangers make me nervous." This may account for his reticence to limit his work to indoor settings. He said there were no preferred places for him to work, as he believed anywhere was beautiful and worthy to be shot, including sparse studios, parks, forests, and atop buildings. Ren's photos employ nude groups and solo portraits of men and women often contorted into highly performative positions. Ren also kept a personal photo collection titled ''I Hate My Past and I Don't Want to Know My Future'' that featured portraits of every person he met, as well as ornaments like used condoms, hair, or mark-making to go with each photo.
Poetry Ren published his first English translated collection of his poetry in January 2017 by BHKM, New York, which selectively contained his poems from 2007 to 2016 named
Word or two, and a collection of poetry in Chinese by
Neurasthenia, Taiwan, which contained his poems from 2007 to 2013 named
Poem Collection of Renhang. This poetry is mainly about his enthusing emotions on describing the ideal love and life with lovers as well as the fear and loneliness when losing loves. The emotional erotic poetry usually comprises a handful of short lines, the tone ranging from humorous to sensual to dark. Here is an extract from a 2016 poem called
Love:
Love My kisses compactly join as a line, like the snake swims around each rugged reef on your trembling body, then you turn into the snake, I turn into the reef, and then we turn into snakes, intertwining together, we turn into reefs, striking each other. Inside the bedroom filed with our fingerprints, those fingerprints keep enlarging, turn into growth rings, turn into mazes. We are lost with the whole world. Ren Hang also expressed his homosexual experiences and identity in his poem collection published in 2016 by
the independent publishing house EDITIONS BESSARD. Here is a poem written by Ren in 2008: Throughout his life, he endured a long battle with depression, an experience he would often document on his website under a menu item titled
My Depression. Here he recorded, sometimes in the form of poetry, his inner struggles against depression, including frequent hallucinations and hearing voices. In one poem, he wrote:
Gift Life indeed is a precious gift but I often think it seems sent to a wrong person ==Style and controversies==