Roulé-Lavé
In 2018, while his wife and daughter were in Korea for eight months, Won Jy decided to optimize the space in their family home to suit his work needs. At the time, he was completing his third-year diploma at the Beaux-Arts in Nîmes. He moved the family mattresses into the basement, slept on the sofa, and worked at the dining table. His daughter’s bedroom became his studio storage. He adjusted his diet to focus on meals that were cheaper and quicker to prepare. His work largely depends on collecting waste and rubble, and all unused space gradually filled up with mountains of used objects. Alone among these piles, he one day heard a pair of pigeons on his terrace. The birds had settled into a crevice he had created to catch sawdust—his terrace had turned into a carpenter’s workshop. Every day, he could observe the pair from his kitchen window. He studied their routine, their comings and goings, and watched the birth of their chicks and their first flight. He wondered whether pigeons could sense the solitude of others, and whether they had chosen to nest with him for that reason.
This anecdote, taken from his thesis[1], sheds light on two core traits of Won Jy’s personality and working method: he is deeply attentive to the contexts in which he works, and he is highly sensitive to the question of otherness. In previous artistic endeavors, Won Jy has fully immersed himself in the environments he observes. Just like the pigeon couple he watches from a specially arranged apartment, he has lived on the streets of Paris, or more recently at Vaisseau 3008[2], a third-space in Nîmes that was recently demolished in the Placette district. In both cases, he camped on-site, engaged with the marginalized communities he met there, and sought to convey these encounters through drawings, installations, sculptures, photographs, and texts—sometimes working solo, sometimes collaboratively. Little remains visibly from his experience in Paris or his year living at the Vaisseau 3008. His street sketchbooks and portraits of its inhabitants are only shown locked in a box. The sculptures left in the basement of the Nîmes third-space ended up buried under rubble, a dormant sarcophagus beneath what will soon be a luxury residence. These opaque archives nonetheless nourish much of his work. He regularly revisits them, exploring them tentatively, self-critical, always allowing the shifting context to suggest new directions.
Soon, little will remain of the artist’s most recent studio either, located in the Wagner Gallery—a 1960s residential and commercial building in the Pissevin district in western Nîmes. For the past two years, Won Jy has occupied a former funeral home, where he first set up a garden of local plants and took in injured pigeons to nurse them back to health. The exhibition Hostis[3] was an attempt to reconstruct a local ecosystem, allowing a familiar bond to develop between the artist and the birds he sheltered. A family of rats eventually dug tunnels into the garden embankments and ended up beheading one of the convalescent pigeons. The ecosystem Won Jy initiated became autonomous and slipped beyond his control. After this period, he reclaimed the space as a studio, where he was able to produce several pieces for Roulé-Lavé at CACN. The Pissevin district is currently undergoing urban renewal, and many buildings in this designated priority area have already been or will soon be demolished. The Wagner Gallery is one of the towers destined to be torn down. Perhaps some of Won Jy’s works will again be buried beneath the debris, joining a series of the artist’s buried projects.
Roulé-Lavé revisits some of Won Jy’s recent projects—sometimes reactivated for the occasion—centered on themes of otherness, hospitality, and the transformation of urban landscapes. The exhibition title refers to the transformation of rock through water movement. It evokes for the artist a Korean expression that could be translated as “rolling stone,” “the rolling stone is coming,” or “a rolling stone dislodges a fixed one,” linking pebbles to the figure of the foreigner. This figure recurs throughout the show, explicitly invoked by the word gharib (Arabic for "foreigner") inscribed on a sculpture-form at the end of the exhibition. It reflects on how foreigners are variably received upon arriving in France, depending on the era and the place they come from. Won Jy is intimately familiar with migratory paths—not only through personal experience, but also through his involvement in local activist collectives that support unaccompanied minors. Some works speak directly to this engagement—such as a presentation of recently abandoned shoes found in a squat in the nearby Valdegour neighborhood—but the broader question of conditional hospitality permeates the entire exhibition.
Searching Roulé-Lavé on Google in France yields results related to construction. It’s a type of gravel used in building, shaped through natural or artificial erosion of submerged stones. These gravels are scattered throughout CACN, either loose on the floor or aggregated into cement, appearing in various registers. When Won Jy collects them along the Hérault River, searching for the most distinctive stone, it can be read as gentle wandering. When he retrieves them from the Pissevin dump[4], it signals a more complex movement—a longer and more brutal history, one that saw concrete towers rise on the outskirts of French cities in the 1960s and now sees them collapse in massive urban renewal plans. The rubble from these former apartment blocks will in turn be rolled, washed, or crushed to build what comes next. These stones carry the memory of the individuals and families they housed for decades. More broadly, they speak to national migration policies and the varying degrees of recognition accorded to different neighborhoods that make up a city.
Mirroring the rubble that proliferates in this former social-medical center, the CACN is also populated by many pigeons. This bird’s status among humans has evolved considerably. Once a symbol of social success—as evidenced by dovecotes in grand country homes, where guano was prized as fertilizer—it also served the military by delivering messages. The white dove of peace is, after all, just an albino pigeon, a symbol still widely recognized today. Yet today, pigeons are considered pests. They survive as best they can in cities, where food is abundant. Cities, however, do not want them and construct an arsenal of tools to exclude them: spikes on balconies, narrow ledges, shards of glass on walls... Won Jy’s works suggest these architectures of exclusion, which affect both animals and sometimes people. He is interested in the shifting status attributed to the same species, and the attention paid to others depending on their assigned status. His work creates, within the art center, a cycle where time, water, stone, humans, and animals intersect and transform into one another.
This anecdote, taken from his thesis[1], sheds light on two core traits of Won Jy’s personality and working method: he is deeply attentive to the contexts in which he works, and he is highly sensitive to the question of otherness. In previous artistic endeavors, Won Jy has fully immersed himself in the environments he observes. Just like the pigeon couple he watches from a specially arranged apartment, he has lived on the streets of Paris, or more recently at Vaisseau 3008[2], a third-space in Nîmes that was recently demolished in the Placette district. In both cases, he camped on-site, engaged with the marginalized communities he met there, and sought to convey these encounters through drawings, installations, sculptures, photographs, and texts—sometimes working solo, sometimes collaboratively. Little remains visibly from his experience in Paris or his year living at the Vaisseau 3008. His street sketchbooks and portraits of its inhabitants are only shown locked in a box. The sculptures left in the basement of the Nîmes third-space ended up buried under rubble, a dormant sarcophagus beneath what will soon be a luxury residence. These opaque archives nonetheless nourish much of his work. He regularly revisits them, exploring them tentatively, self-critical, always allowing the shifting context to suggest new directions.
Soon, little will remain of the artist’s most recent studio either, located in the Wagner Gallery—a 1960s residential and commercial building in the Pissevin district in western Nîmes. For the past two years, Won Jy has occupied a former funeral home, where he first set up a garden of local plants and took in injured pigeons to nurse them back to health. The exhibition Hostis[3] was an attempt to reconstruct a local ecosystem, allowing a familiar bond to develop between the artist and the birds he sheltered. A family of rats eventually dug tunnels into the garden embankments and ended up beheading one of the convalescent pigeons. The ecosystem Won Jy initiated became autonomous and slipped beyond his control. After this period, he reclaimed the space as a studio, where he was able to produce several pieces for Roulé-Lavé at CACN. The Pissevin district is currently undergoing urban renewal, and many buildings in this designated priority area have already been or will soon be demolished. The Wagner Gallery is one of the towers destined to be torn down. Perhaps some of Won Jy’s works will again be buried beneath the debris, joining a series of the artist’s buried projects.
Roulé-Lavé revisits some of Won Jy’s recent projects—sometimes reactivated for the occasion—centered on themes of otherness, hospitality, and the transformation of urban landscapes. The exhibition title refers to the transformation of rock through water movement. It evokes for the artist a Korean expression that could be translated as “rolling stone,” “the rolling stone is coming,” or “a rolling stone dislodges a fixed one,” linking pebbles to the figure of the foreigner. This figure recurs throughout the show, explicitly invoked by the word gharib (Arabic for "foreigner") inscribed on a sculpture-form at the end of the exhibition. It reflects on how foreigners are variably received upon arriving in France, depending on the era and the place they come from. Won Jy is intimately familiar with migratory paths—not only through personal experience, but also through his involvement in local activist collectives that support unaccompanied minors. Some works speak directly to this engagement—such as a presentation of recently abandoned shoes found in a squat in the nearby Valdegour neighborhood—but the broader question of conditional hospitality permeates the entire exhibition.
Searching Roulé-Lavé on Google in France yields results related to construction. It’s a type of gravel used in building, shaped through natural or artificial erosion of submerged stones. These gravels are scattered throughout CACN, either loose on the floor or aggregated into cement, appearing in various registers. When Won Jy collects them along the Hérault River, searching for the most distinctive stone, it can be read as gentle wandering. When he retrieves them from the Pissevin dump[4], it signals a more complex movement—a longer and more brutal history, one that saw concrete towers rise on the outskirts of French cities in the 1960s and now sees them collapse in massive urban renewal plans. The rubble from these former apartment blocks will in turn be rolled, washed, or crushed to build what comes next. These stones carry the memory of the individuals and families they housed for decades. More broadly, they speak to national migration policies and the varying degrees of recognition accorded to different neighborhoods that make up a city.
Mirroring the rubble that proliferates in this former social-medical center, the CACN is also populated by many pigeons. This bird’s status among humans has evolved considerably. Once a symbol of social success—as evidenced by dovecotes in grand country homes, where guano was prized as fertilizer—it also served the military by delivering messages. The white dove of peace is, after all, just an albino pigeon, a symbol still widely recognized today. Yet today, pigeons are considered pests. They survive as best they can in cities, where food is abundant. Cities, however, do not want them and construct an arsenal of tools to exclude them: spikes on balconies, narrow ledges, shards of glass on walls... Won Jy’s works suggest these architectures of exclusion, which affect both animals and sometimes people. He is interested in the shifting status attributed to the same species, and the attention paid to others depending on their assigned status. His work creates, within the art center, a cycle where time, water, stone, humans, and animals intersect and transform into one another.