T_158
The engine's readingBlunt black fans crowd a long paper from the left, then narrow through a low neck into a combed, curving sweep at the right.
Record- Date
- 2026.03.28
- Dimensions
- 70 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 5.2
- Paper
- Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw)
- Ink
- Kuretake Shogei Kiwami, Yi De Ge Zhonghua, Boku-Undo Bokkou
Up in the grey near the top sits a small ring, the kind a glass leaves on a table after years of being told about coasters. The table lives in a kitchen at the hour when the pipes are the loudest thing in the house. You get up for water. The bed keeps your warm place for you, badly. You drink some at the sink, standing, and set the glass down exactly where you were asked not to. In the morning a cloth comes through and misses the spot, perhaps kindly. I have loved worse furniture. The ring goes on drying beside the salt, with the light off.
The reading
Written by the engine after V23's reads, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains V23's numbers and may not change them.
- Structure
- overlapping fan wedges fused left and centre, joined by a low neck to right fan
- Movement
- left to right through the neck into the right arc; nothing runs against it
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- three tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- two kinds: pale grey sweeps readable lower right and top; darks fused centre
- Edges
- feathered soft along fan tops; crisp at grey overlaps; broken at lower stroke ends
- Feibai
- present, in the streaked ends of pale grey sweeps, upper right and lower centre
- Open paper
- narrow irregular white notch at upper right; thin remnants at corners
- Chance marks
- drip blots in right fan; stray blots at edges; rings and mottling in centre
- Frame
- ink runs off top, bottom and right; left edge and corners stay open
A dark weight crosses a long paper from left to right. Great blunt fans stand shoulder to shoulder at the left, crowd into the middle, then narrow through a low neck and swing out into a curved fan at the right. The load arrives before any shape does.
The right fan is where the sheet wakes up. The brush dragged across raw paper and left combed ridges, pale arcs running inside the black, so the dark has a grain and a direction. Beneath it, a grey sweep stays clear. Nowhere else does the ink say how it got there.
Left and centre pay for all this. The wedges run together into a single slab, their joins ragged, their order lost. Fast paper took pass after pass and closed them; the black inside stays nearly flat, broken only by creases, cloudy mottling and small water rings. The white notch at upper right reads as paper left over rather than space made.
The sheet stays middling and heavy: a good corner at the far end of a long, congested walk. You would not cross a room twice for it.
The rating
T_158, rated 5.2
The combined score, out of 10: V23's reading of the photograph as the read half and V24's twelve tests on the 16-bit file as the measured half, added and divided by 10. The scale is relative to this archive. How each half is made is on the Method page.
- Form
- 2.0 · built
- Tonal depth
- 2.0 · modelled
- Layering
- 2.0 · legible
- Composition
- 1.6 · working
- Material and surface
- 1.0 · flawed
- Mass
- 7.9 of 10
- Tone
- 7.8 of 14
- Void
- 4.8 of 8
- Flow
- 4.8 of 10
- Balance
- 6.4 of 8
How it was measured
What V24 measured.
Plain physical facts with no model involved. Across the year they track how the practice changes. On one sheet they cannot say whether a mark is any good. Millimetres read a few percent high, because the photographs are cropped just inside the paper's edge.
The width of the ink mask along its medial axis.
Optical density at the 75th percentile of the sheet.
The radius of the largest circle of open paper.
How far the marks align across the sheet. Lower means they run several ways.
Left and right asymmetry of the ink. Lower is more even.
Pixels to the millimetre in the TIFF these were measured from, with the studio light removed.
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
3 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.045 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“A dense black sheet whose strong right fan has banded, dry-brush interior. The left and centre wedges fuse into a crowded, cloudy dark mass with crackle and blots inside it, which holds the sheet near ordinary.”
Left fan and right curved sweep read as brush-travel forms; the centre merges into a heavy slab where the wedge outlines blur and join clumsily.
WEAKEST Bulky fused central dark mass, shapes merging
STRONGEST Right arc-banded fan stroke with combed ridges
Interior modulation 0.045, borderline. Right mass shows ridges and graded arcs; the large left/centre black is mostly uniform with cloudy mottling. Three tonal steps.
WEAKEST Left/centre dark mass interior largely cloudy
STRONGEST Right fan with arc banding inside dark
Pale grey sweeps lie under the darks and stay readable at the lower right and top centre; the overlapping central wedges largely merge, so their order is hard to read.
WEAKEST Centre overlaps where wedges fuse into one dark
STRONGEST Grey under-sweeps beneath right and lower strokes
Ink covers 87% of the sheet. The mass travels left to right into the right curve, and the white notch top right is shaped, but the left half is congested.
WEAKEST Heavy left two-thirds crowding the frame
STRONGEST Diagonal flow from left fans to right sweep
The tone-stretched view shows crease lines, small rings and cloudy patches inside the left/centre mass; the drip blots in the right fan and the speckled spatter around the edges look unintended.
WEAKEST Milky crackle and blotches inside central dark
STRONGEST Dry-brush combed ridges in right fan
6 distinct places, 2 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 6 distinct places, 21 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 5 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 17 edge segments, 24% crisp, 71% soft or bloomed, 6% broken.
V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.03.28, day 90 of the Crucible Year, one of 4 paintings from that date (2 shown). 80 works were registered in the fourteen days before. Paintings are dated by the day their batch was registered and photographed; each was finished that day or within the few days before. Phase: P1 Warm-up (working title).
T_158 among all 419
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw), Anhui Jingxian Tanxi Xuan Paper Art Products Co., Ltd., made 2015.11.19
- Ink MB1
- Kuretake Shogei Kiwami, Kuretake
- Ink MB2
- Yi De Ge Zhonghua, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB3
- Boku-Undo Bokkou, Boku-Undo
Related
