Liu Dan

After graduating from Jiangsu Chinese Painting Institute during the late 1970s, Liu Dan moved to the United States in 1981 and lived both there and in the United Kingdom through 2004.  Liu completed Old Man Stone right before he returned to China in the early spring of 2005. While living abroad for almost a decade, Liu developed a deep knowledge of contemporary trends in Western art. However, he chooses to work both within and beyond the Chinese ink tradition, consistently producing works that are among the most compelling contemporary landscape paintings in this traditional medium.  Whether of stones, poppy flowers, or classically inspired landscapes, Liu’s works embody an exceptional beauty, one balanced between solid, calculated compositions and elegant, free-hand gestures. Liu is perhaps the most paradoxical painter in contemporary Chinese art, particularly as his apparent adherence to traditional methodologies is frequently deployed as a cover for a more conceptual practice.

In his treatments of stones and landscapes, the works of Northern Song (960-1127) masters are Liu’s most evident sources of inspiration. Unlike traditionalists, Liu often spends days or even months in carefully outlining what he is going to paint; his goal is the “objective representation of the subject matter” that somehow gets beyond a ‘true’ representation of reality to a quintessential, larger-than-life form, isolated on the picture plane.  For Old Man Stone, Liu modeled the stone after Tall Rock in the Form of an Honorable Old Man from the Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars’ Rocks (the rock was shown as part of the traveling exhibition Worlds within Worlds, organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of the Harvard University Art Museums). Liu enlarges this dark gray Ying limestone from Ming dynasty (1368-1644) of approximately sixty seven inches to a magnificent work of more than ninety seven inches, with no loss of detail or resolution, save for the inscriptions on the rock which he intentionally leaves out. To Liu, the rock represents the magical abstract patterns of solid and void that relate it to contemporary Western sculpture. Liu’s superior treatment of the object is elegant, spiritual and constructive. As Ackbar Abbas comments, “The clearer they appear, the more misleading they are,” suggesting there is more than meets the eye to the exquisitely refined work of this highly original contemporary master. (Ackbar Abbas, “Liu Dan’s Art of Deception: Some Notes on 12 Views of Little Openwork”)