Roller

Roller points to a threshold where flight slips into disorientation. Taking selectively bred ornamental pigeons as its point of departure, the work translates their mid-air rotations and downward falls into fixed trajectories of movement. What originally belongs to chance and risk—falling—is here trained, repeated, and ultimately rendered as a form to be viewed and appreciated. Through this paradoxical imagery, Ren Han reveals how natural behavior is reshaped within systems of aesthetics, entertainment, and control: imbalance no longer signifies failure, but is transformed into a stable visual structure. The work thus gestures toward a broader tradition of spectatorship—how intervention, violence, and falling are unconsciously absorbed into order and endowed with form and meaning.

This series is produced on the surfaces of old books collected by the artist. Through physical incision and destruction, Ren Han turns vessels of knowledge and narrative into sites where motion, descent, and instability become visible, allowing images to drift across the covers like ghosts, moving over the surfaces of juxtaposed books.