Roller

The Roller series takes selectively bred ornamental pigeons as its point of departure. Bred for distinctive aerial movements, these birds perform involuntary-looking rotations and downward falls that transform instability into a repeatable spectacle. What might otherwise belong to chance, risk, and disorientation becomes trained, aestheticised, and ultimately presented for human appreciation.

Han Ren translates these movements into fixed trajectories carved across the surfaces of found books. The birds’ unstable bodies become images, while the books—vessels of knowledge, memory, and cultural transmission—become surfaces of physical incision and destruction. The series brings together natural behaviour and human intervention, asking how violence, control, and imbalance can be absorbed into systems of beauty and spectatorship. Through carving, movement becomes static: falling is transformed into form, and instability into an image that can be repeatedly viewed.