I Ching I

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is the ancient Chinese divinatory text built on a system of sixty-four hexagrams, each composed of six stacked horizontal lines that are either solid (yang) or broken (yin). As the first plate in a four-print sequence, I Ching I likely isolates a single hexagram, trigram, or generative element of this binary system and presents it as a graphic image in carved relief. The reduction of the hexagram to essential horizontal bands lends itself to woodblock methods: a small number of long parallel cuts, registered cleanly against unprinted ground, can carry the figure's full informational content. Qian's bicultural background — born in Shanghai, trained in China and the United States — and his coupling of art history with mathematics make the I Ching an unusually direct subject, at once a foundational Chinese cultural artifact and a binary combinatorial system. The print extends a recurring engagement with diagrammatic and ordered structures across his oeuvre.