Liu Dan, Scholar's Rock in the Xiao Gushan Guan Collection | 劉丹 《叠》水墨紙本 2022年作 鏡框

Acquired directly from the artist.

得自藝術家本人

As an intellectual painter, Liu Dan chooses to portray subjects that seem deceptively simple in form, yet upon further inspection, or realisation of physical scale, one is awestruck by the levels and layers of detail that he reveals in his painting. He paints slowly and deliberately due to the details and delicacy that each work demands. His frequent return to the same subject is far from a monotonous repeated exercise, but is an exciting and ongoing conversation between the artist and his art, different each time.

The scholar’s stone is perhaps one of Liu Dan’s favourite and most frequently revisited subjects, which in Chinese history is the focus of passionate connoisseurship in both the imperial court and literatus circles since the Tang dynasty.¹ Admired for its complex patterns and organic textures that suggest infinite natural forms, the rock serves as a microcosmic symbol of the forms in the universe. Fascinated by the ever-changing facets of scholar’s stones and their embrace of Daoist philosophy, Liu Dan pursued their study in his paintings since the 1980s in exploration of the structure of Chinese landscape paintings.² While his painting techniques refer to a mastery of traditional painting and his subjects are seemingly representational, his works are meant to be viewed as interpretations of how one judges and understands information. Liu Dan creates portraits of scholar’s rocks an individual study of observation. With his dry and textured brushstrokes, he gradually reveals the layers the multi-faceted surfaces as if re-sculpturing the three-dimensional stone onto the two-dimensional paper. As seen in the present work, the dynamic inner movement created from the object is always balanced by his elegant kaishu inscriptions, which demands absolute poise and concentration.

1 Alexandra Munroe, “Why Ink? The Art of Liu Dan,” in Alternative Visions: Liu Dan and Hiromitsu Morimoto, pp. 7 – 17. The Gallery at Takashimaya, New York, 1993.

2 Li Xiaoqian, “Interview with Liu Dan”, excerpted from Union of Mind and Dao, Suzhou Museum, 2012.