From 23 to 64

The title proposes a directed sequence — a movement between two integers — and the gap of forty-one steps suggests an extended progression rather than a single state. Within Qian's printmaking practice, numbered or paired titles typically index a system: ages, dates, hexagram numerals (the I Ching tops out at sixty-four hexagrams), or counted iterations within a reduction-printed block. If linked to the I Ching, the title could trace a hexagram-to-hexagram progression; if biographical, it could mark a span of years. Compositionally, such from–to prints in his catalogue tend to lay out countable units across a flat field, allowing the eye to read difference as accumulation. Reduction-cut woodblock printing is well suited to this kind of work: each successive carving and impression encodes a step in a sequence onto the same block, so the finished print physically embodies its own progression. From 23 to 64 belongs to Qian's broader interest in numerical structure, serial logic, and the diagrammatic image.