20f01

20f01 was created during Han Ren’s residency at Yishu8 in Paris, using the institution’s existing bookshelf together with books he collected and found. The work began partly from the image of cranes in the Song-dynasty painting Auspicious Cranes by Emperor Huizong, but the birds ultimately carved into the books were observed in a park near the residency: ordinary pigeons inhabiting the everyday landscape of Paris.
This movement between the auspicious birds of a historical painting and the ubiquitous pigeons of contemporary urban life shifts the image from symbolism toward observation. The bookshelf becomes a space where different histories and forms of human–animal relations overlap. The books also recall Han Ren’s early experience in China of encountering Western culture through cut-open imported books circulated through informal networks. By carving images across their surfaces, he transforms these vessels of knowledge and cultural transmission into a fragmented urban landscape, where the ordinary and the historical, the natural and the constructed, continually intersect.