Tongji Philip Qian

Tongji Philip Qian is a multidisciplinary Chinese-American artist born in Shanghai whose extensive printmaking practice — concentrated on hand-pulled woodblock print, both mokuhanga and reduction-cut techniques — anchors a broader body of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and artist-book work. He earned dual B.A. degrees in Art History and Mathematics from Carleton College in 2013 and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He is the co-founder of TPQ Studio (the studio appears as '2026 TPQ Studio' in his artist site infrastructure), which serves as his exhibition and pedagogical platform.

Qian's printmaking career began in Yunnan province in southwestern China, the rural mountainous region close to Tibet where he made woodblock prints by hand using local materials. As he describes the orientation of his early Yunnan practice, the adherence to the autonomy of the artist (attempting to be original) and the nonjudgemental mentality of the craftsperson (following strict printing procedures) collaborated within him to 'promote unanticipated ways to maximize freedom between polarities.' This dialectic — the artist's freedom against the craftsperson's procedure — has remained the structuring tension of his print work, with each subsequent series responding to the same foundational question through different formal and conceptual moves.

His woodblock catalogue is organized into thematic series that map his artistic-conceptual lenses: 'Constructivism' (geometric structural prints), 'I Ching in Progress' and 'Chance and I Ching' (chance-operations and East Asian divinatory iconography), 'A Print a Day for 25 Days' (durational seriality), 'Disquality' (paradox titling), and the open-ended 'Miscellaneous' grouping that contains many of his most cited single prints. Documented works include 'Conventional Formality' (mokuhanga, 25 × 19 inches), 'Unclear Rhombus' (mokuhanga, 32 × 13 inches), 'Southwest' (reduction woodblock, 24 × 18 inches), 'Fierté' (24 × 18 inches), 'Orgueil' (24 × 18 inches), 'Doubled' (reduction woodblock, 17 × 26 inches), 'Pure' (5 × 12 inches), 'Three Dimensions of Lines' (17 × 23 inches), 'End of January / Trump' (18 × 24 inches), 'Varanasi I' (12 × 22 inches), 'Diagonal Architecture' (18 × 24 inches), 'Chance and Grids' (18 × 24 inches), 'Environmental Chance' (20 × 25 inches), 'Wismar Autobiography' (11.7 × 16.5 inches), and the 车 (chē, 'vehicle') series. The 'I Ching' suite consists of four large-format prints (each 18 × 24 inches) that adapt the 64-hexagram structure of the Chinese Book of Changes to the woodblock format.

Qian's mature artist statement identifies his motivating themes as speed, labor, internationalism, and immigration — and his recent work examines the Shanghai Biennale 2000 (the first international contemporary-art showcase in a state-sponsored Chinese museum) as the foundational episode of contemporary Chinese art's international opening. As a Chinese artist working in the United States, his practice navigates the consequences and risks of cultural mobility, and his sustained interest in I Ching divinatory chance-operations places him within a continuing East-West intellectual tradition that includes John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and the early Fluxus circle.

His drawings and paintings are held in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum, the Mecklenburgisches Künstlerhaus Schloss Plüschow (Germany), and the Yangdeng Art Museum (China). His artist books are housed in the Smith College Special Collections, Bard College Special Collections, Georgetown University Library Special Collections, the Center for Book Arts in New York, and Asia Art Archive in America. He is represented through Artsy, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC), and the Cosmic Heart Gallery, and his work has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions including 'And Then Some' and 'Duration of Status' at Simon's Rock.

Qian's practice exemplifies the contemporary international woodblock-print tradition that combines East Asian mokuhanga technique, conceptual chance-operations, and a sustained interrogation of artistic labor as a form of cross-cultural immigration. Within the cluster of US-based contemporary mokuhanga artists, his Shanghai-Yunnan-RISD-Carleton trajectory represents the academic-conceptual strand of the medium's revival, and his sustained serial production over fifteen years places him among the most-exhibited Chinese-American printmakers of his generation.