1F ART TALKS: Bobby Benedicto - No Need for Statements: Ren Hang and the Form of Non-Meaning

No Need for Statements: Ren Hang and the Form of Non-Meaning

We are excited to announce that Bobby Benedicto (Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University) will give a lecture titled "No Need for Statements: Ren Hang and the Form of Non-Meaning" on Saturday, February 21, at 5pm at 1F Projects in Makati, Metro Manila.

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This lecture examines the burden of meaning imposed on the racialized body through a reading of the work of Chinese queer photographer Ren Hang. Despite Ren’s repeated insistence that his images carried no political message, critical reception has persistently framed his work as dissident, liberatory, or reparative, interpreting the naked Asian body through familiar narratives of resistance, freedom, or representational recovery. The lecture asks why such interpretive frameworks prove so difficult to suspend, even where the work appears to invite non-reading. When the racialized body is at stake, the refusal or suspension of meaning becomes structurally unavailable: interpretation cannot stop itself. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and close attention to photographic form, the analysis follows how Ren’s compositions — marked by fragmentation, geometric arrangement, and affective flatness — displace interpretation from questions of identity or expression toward the operations through which meaning attaches to the body in the first place. Sexuality emerges here less as identity or expression than as a structural cut, exposing the racialized body as the site where meaning fails to disappear, and where form remains bound to loss, negativity, and death.

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Bobby Benedicto is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, where he convenes the Sex in Theory working group. His research engages queer theory, psychoanalysis, visual culture, and the aesthetics of sexuality, with particular attention to questions of negativity, death, and representation. He is the author of Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies and recipient of an honorable mention for the Ruth Benedict Prize for Queer Anthropology. His forthcoming book, Fatal Sex: Queer of Color Negativity and the Erotics of Death (Duke University Press), examines the relation between sex, law, perversion, and mortality through analyses of film, photography, true crime, and the subculture of chemsex. His recent work has appeared in Postmodern Culture, differences, and GLQ.