Liu Dan

executed in 1994-1995
marked with one seal of the artist

Acquired directly from the artist.
A private Asian collection.

China Without Borders: An Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art, Sotheby's, New York, 2001, pp. 72-73.
The Second Contemporary Landscape Painting Invitational Exhibition, Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2004, pp. 25-26.

Selected Objects of Scholarly Admiration / Liu Dan, Jeff Hsu's Art, Taipei, 2005, unpaginated.

Near lower left border of the image, there are signs of restoration where there may have been a small hole. There is minor foxing in several areas near the image left, top center and top right, which can be improved by restoration. The total size of the image and mounting is approximately 212 by 550 cm.; 83 1/2 by 216 1/2 in.
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Liu Dan’s Landscape
Kuiyi Shen

Liu Dan is perhaps one of the most persistent painters in the Chinese contemporary art world.  While other artists eagerly explore new concepts and mediums, he insists on developing traditional art on the basis of its innate principals.  From an early age he was particularly infatuated with European Renaissance drawings, studied Chinese ink painting, and travelled to Dunhuang to research ancient mural paintings.  He found certain commonalities between the medieval European and Renaissance masters desire to communicate with God and the early Chinese calligraphers and painters attempt to harmonize mind and nature.  Liu Dan’s painting often possesses a strong element of drawing. Moreover, this quality, combined with his deep understanding of the essentials of traditional landscape painting, give his painting a refined classical beauty.

In the 1980s, Liu Dan started to research the shapes and structures of rocks and mountains, which enabled him to gradually establish his own theory of landscape painting, “from an understanding of the macrocosm, explore the microcosm.”  He may transform his composition into a transcendent world through the contemplation of a rock, or turn his observation of flickering candlelight into a fantastic vision of his microcosm. Liu Dan likes “to turn images into indescribable illusions by manipulating their familiar features to bring out their quality of otherness and by transforming Yin and Yang. This reconstructs an order apart from the physical objects.”^[i] It reminds me of the landscape painter Gong Xian (ca. 1617-1699) of the seventeenth century. In his painting, Gong Xian aimed for two major qualities: stability and strangeness. He believed that in a landscape painting, the “composition should be stable, but it has to be both strange and stable. If it has no strangeness, there is no value in its stability. …If you can combine the utmost strangeness with the utmost stability, that is the highest achievement of painting. It comes from natural endowment and long practice.”^[ii] Gong Xian tried to create painting that was strange or novel enough in its imagery to draw the beholder out of the mundane realm, and for it to be sufficiently visually convincing in its style to make the dream-journey seem real.^[iii] In Splendour of Heaven and Earth, Liu Dan captured this “strangeness” and created an illusionary realm for people’s dream-journeys through his meticulous composition and delicate brushwork.   Just as Gong Xian wrote in one of his inscriptions, “if the ink and brushwork are correct but the hills and ravines are commonplace, there will be nothing [in the picture] that can lead one off on journeys of the imagination.”^[iv] In Liu Dan’s work, the originality of the composition, the strong contrast of light and shadow, the mysterious luminosity of the fog in the background, and the blankness of the water area, create a dramatic, illusionary realm, in which spirits of people are wandering.

Clearly, the fantastic scenery that Liu Dan has here represented is the artist’s own internal macrocosm.  People often exclaim at the refined subtlety and rational order of Liu Dan’s mountains and rocks, and his display of amazing self-discipline.  For example, in 2010 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition Fresh Ink—Ten Chinese Artists he responded to a scholar’s rock in the museum collection, Honorable Old Man Stone, by painting a nine-panel work of the same title. Installed in a semi-circular arrangement surrounding the actual strange stone, this visually powerful installation created a tranquil and meditative atmosphere almost like a Zen garden. Yet, his landscapes are often full of a burgeoning vitality. In Splendour of Heaven and Earth, the abstract objects on the surface of his mountains and rocks resemble microorganisms freely spreading their primeval life in an organic expansion.  However, at the same time, his treatment of the plastic qualities of light, dark, and volume and his delicate details of painted execution create a special consciousness of time and space in the microcosm.  

Over the past three decades, Liu Dan persistently explores within the field of ink painting. In his work, we can see that no matter what he depicts, he is always wandering in his microcosmic world, and reaches a state in which “all things and self are mutually forgotten.”  As he says, “I never choose from among the known. I’m only interested in creating answers to the unknown.”^[v]  

[i] Li Xiaoqian,  “Discovering the Self in the Continuation of Tradition—An Interview with Liu Dan,” Why Not Ink, eds. Kuiyi Shen and Li Xiaoqian. Beijing: Mountain Art Foundation and Today Art Museum, 2012, p. 20.

[ii] Gong Xian, Huajue, in Meishu congshu, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 36. Here I adopt James Cahill’s translation in his The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 168.

[iii] Cahill, Compelling Image, p. 168.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Zhao Qian, “Response and Transcend: Ink Painting of Liu Dan and Li Huayi,” (translated by Matthew Schrader), Leap, June 2011, p. 144.