To Chat

"To Chat" — given as an English infinitive verb rather than a noun — locates the print within what reads as a series of titled actions, paired with "To Exhaust" in this group. The infinitive form strips the verb of subject and tense, presenting it as bare action. Reduction-cut printing builds the image through sequential carving and printing on a single block, each pass destroying earlier states; "to chat" suggests an accumulation analogous to conversation itself — layered, additive, lossy. The composition likely uses overlapping color fields built up across multiple printings, possibly with a lighter palette or looser registration than more architectural works in the artist's output. Conceptually, the title aligns with a recurring concern in Qian's practice with everyday verbs and ordinary experience as material for formal abstraction, the same impulse that surfaces in his attention to language pairs and binary structures. The reduction process itself parallels chat: irrecoverable, sequential, incremental.