Chance and Grids

The title pairs two organizing principles—stochastic and systematic—familiar from twentieth-century process art and conceptualism. The print likely employs a regular gridded matrix punctuated by chance-determined variations in color, registration, or carving incident. Mokuhanga, with its dependence on hand-pressed baren impressions and water-based pigments absorbed into washi, introduces its own non-systematic tonal variability into otherwise rule-based structures: even an identical block produces measurably distinct impressions across an edition. Qian's mathematics background gives him a vocabulary for articulating these structures explicitly, and the print continues his engagement with conceptual frameworks in which tabulated regularity meets the artisanal contingencies of relief printmaking. Within his wider body of work, this piece sits adjacent to 'Environmental Chance' and other process-titled prints that name their generative methods openly, treating the rule-set as part of the image.