After being denied university admission due to a congenital heart condition, Qian Weikang spent over five years (1982-1987) working as a boiler worker at Shanghai’s Dalong Machine Factory. During this period, he immersed himself in literary societies, modernist poetry, radical writing, and was introduced to avant-garde art and modernist thought through literature. A voracious reader, Qian was deeply influenced by European literature, particularly by its modernist and avant-garde movements. In 1990, within the confines of his 20-square-meter apartment on the outskirts of Shanghai, Qian embarked on an experimental literary journey, creating what he termed “ladder poems.” Engrossed in poetry and art criticism, Qian sought a radical approach to literary writing. He drew lines on his room’s floor with chalk, like those in an exercise book, and randomly selected over 100 words from the Modern Chinese Dictionary. Each word was written on a separate piece of paper. Climbing a folding wooden ladder, he dropped these papers from a height, allowing them to scatter randomly. The words, where they landed, were then transcribed into a notebook, forming automated poems. These were not conventional sentences, but Qian was fascinated by this “destruction of words,” a process resembling “free writing” and partly inspired by Samuel Beckett and the art of happenings, with their anti-logical narrative. As Qian shifted towards visual artistry, his Ladder Poem experiment waned. However, the principles of self-imposed rules and restraint persisted in his work from 1993 to 1996, where he developed artworks that utilized measurement tools to objectively quantify emotions, experiences, and the subjective process of creation. His visual art debut was an installation tailored to the exhibition space, comprising nearly 30,000 pieces of white school chalk. He arranged half of these chalks standing on the ground, while the other half appeared scattered, forming a triangular shape (One Divided into Two is Still Not Enough, 1993).