Orgueil

"Orgueil," French for pride understood as arrogance, vanity, or hubris, pairs directly with "Fierté," the same word's morally positive twin. Where Fierté names the dignified self-regard of an honest accomplishment, orgueil carries the older Catholic weight of the deadly sin — pride as overreach, as the elevation of the self above its rightful place. The pairing reflects a strategy in Qian's printed work of using language pairs to stage conceptual oppositions that the visual image alone could not articulate. The print's composition likely echoes or inverts that of Fierté, offering a visual analogue to the moral inversion the words perform: the same form treated harshly rather than honorably, or weighted, colored, or registered against the surface in a way that signals excess. The diptych format also resonates with broader binary structures in Qian's practice, where reduction-cut and mokuhanga, abstraction and figuration, geometry and atmosphere recur as paired terms.