Categories: Chinese Art, Postwar Art
“Why Ink? The Art of Liu Dan.” In Alternative Visions: Liu Dan and Hiromitsu Morimoto, pp.
7–17. Exh. cat. New York and Tokyo: The Gallery at Takashimaya, 1993.
Why Ink? The Art of Liu Dan
By Alexandra Munroe
What is the difference, a friend once asked Liu Dan, between yourself and the great masters of
Chinese painting? “They lived in the past,’ the artist replied, “I live in the present.”1 Improbable
as it seems, this pithy remark in fact de- scribes the central issue of Liu Dan’s work: How can the
art and thought of China’s past be practiced and changed to communicate original meaning in a
contemporary way? Implied, too, is the artist’s belief that “Creation is not merely an interesting
idea. It is soul.”
The crisis of being a contemporary Chinese artist produced conflict and confusion early in Liu
Dan’s career, first in post-Mao China and later in Reagan’s America, as he tried to find his
identity among the plethora of tempting, often dead-end possibilities. His choices were
complicated partly because the cultural foundation of the tradition he mastered was nearly
destroyed in his lifetime, and partly because he could not ignore the challenge of modern art and
its avant-garde ideal. Skillfully trained in both ink painting and life drawing, Liu was equally
drawn to Chinese and European arts, classical and modern cultures. As a Chinese artist, the
creative challenge he faced was to go beyond the well-traveled routes of synthesis and
combination. Now forty, he has succeeded in forging a uniquely different expression—grounded
in the past, but relevant to the present.
What makes Liu Dan’s “traditional” painting creative in the Chinese sense, rather than merely
conservative, is his innovative response to the stimulus of cultural legacy. Since the fourteenth
century, the real subject of Chinese ink painting has been the artist’s personal interpretation of
the existing tradition. This was not just an apprenticeship to history, but a dialogue with the past
and often an oblique criticism of the present. Working with the constant variables of brush, ink,
and paper, the more creative artists have sought to invent a new level of stylistic integration and
a new concept of self-expression that would take the tradition forward. By his statements and his
art, Liu Dan assumes a position in this thousand-year lineage despite the fact that he has gone
outside China and beyond antiquity for his sources: Dürer, Blake, and Georgia O’Keeffe have
impressed the artist as much as the Northern Song and Yuan masters, and the violence he
witnessed during the Cultural Revolution and again at the Tiananmen massacre gives to his
practice of ink painting a radical imperative to heal.
Twentieth-century Chinese painting is orthodoxy unto itself. In China, despite frequent swings in
the government’s art policy, ink painting is the mainstream. Contrary to the relatively meager
state of international scholarship on modern Japanese-style painting, the cultural confidence of
the Chinese and the strength of the tradition itself have contributed to the survival of the guohua
(national painting) discourse.2 In Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West, modern Chinese painting is
well-established as a serious field of creativity, research, and collection. The standard histories of
modern guohua are usually organized in terms of mainland or overseas Chinese artists, and the
aesthetic and political ideals of Chinese painting in the pre-Liberation versus post-1949 decades.
Few studies, however, have yet explored contemporary ink painting by the younger “Red Guard
Generation,” or considered what challenge the new Chinese painting poses to contemporary
international painting at large. In this context, the recent work of Liu Dan—a naturalized
American citizen and a disciple of multiple traditions—suggests an alternative vision.
Red China
Liu Dan was born in 1953 in Nanjing. His parents, married the year New China was founded,
were both college teachers in Jiangsu Province. Liu Dan’s paternal ancestors came originally
from the North and, as members of China’s scholar-official class during much of the Qing
dynasty (1644–1912), enjoyed the culture and wealth of the governing elite. The Liu family fell
in the late nineteenth century, when Dan’s great grandfather, an opium addict, dissipated the
family fortune and lost any hope of regaining a post in the Imperial bureaucracy.
Despite impoverished funds and the collapse of dynastic China at the hands of reformist Sun
Yatsen, Liu Dan’s grandfather adhered to the conservative ideals of his Confucian heritage and
continued to live in the style of the now-defunct literati class. Because it was typical to share a
household among three generations, Liu Dan was given a strict classical education that valued
quite the opposite of what he was taught at his socialist schools: In the wenren (literati) tradition,
his grandfather imparted a philosophy of self-cultivation based on reading books, perfecting
calligraphy, and respecting the cultural past. He also disdained politics, courting the Communist
Party’s incrimination by listening to the Voice of America, hoarding gold, and corresponding
with friends who had escaped the mainland to live abroad. Liu’s independent-minded
grandfather was thus the critical influence in his early life.
Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, is among the great cities in the southern Yangtze River
basin. Literally “southern capital,” Nanjing has been a political, economic, and cultural center of
China since the fall of the Han in 220 A.D., and was on and off the nation’s capital right through
the modern era. Most remarkably, Nanjing is the birthplace of several of China’s most revered
artists, from the landscape painter Dong Yuan (ca. 900–962), considered a prototype of the
wenren tradition, to Xu Beihong (1895–1953), one of the founding fathers of China’s modern art
movement. Together with neighboring Anhui and Zhejiang provinces, this rich district has
produced the majority of China’s important painters and innovative schools since the tenth
century.3 The south is therefore to Chinese culture what Tuscany is to the Italian Renaissance,
and instilled in Liu Dan a natural proclivity for art.
Growing up in the early years of New China was a euphoric experience at first. By 1953, when
Liu was born, China seemed recovered from the brutal occupation of the Japanese, the long civil
war between the Communists and the Nationalists, and the social chaos and economic disaster
that had threatened the entire nation before the Communist takeover. With beloved Chairman
Mao at the helm, massive land redistribution programs and investment in industrial development
helped propel China from a “feudal state” into a modern, socialist bureaucracy. It would be years
before the Chinese people would learn the human cost of these drastic economic reforms, or
know the tragic extent of the Party’s regular purges to wipe out political and intellectual dissent.
Although Liu Dan’s parents were targeted in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, he was
himself unaffected until the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Reflecting on what he saw, what he
did, and what he was “brainwashed” into thinking as a teenage Red Guard during this
nightmarish crusade, Liu admits that he may never fully recover from these traumatic years. The
mission of China’s mass student youth, a mobilization of millions of boys and girls in a fanatic
cult of Mao as God, was to carry out the revolution’s battle cry to “Destroy the Four Olds,” an
attack against old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Liu Dan’s parents were
among the Cultural Revolution’s estimated one hundred million victims: As teachers, his mother
and father were subjected to severe criticism, public humiliation, and “reeducation.”
Liu Dan joined a faction of the Nanjing Red Guards in 1966. Just thirteen years old, he spent the
next two years in bloody guerrilla warfare. The Gang of Four’s puppets had turned militant as
factions swearing loyalty to Mao began to fight each other for territorial and ideological control
of the cities. As a participant in the rallies and the fighting, Liu Dan witnessed horror.
The Red Guard years are important for understanding Liu Dan’s mature work, for in ways, his
expression of personal trauma—that which he calls his generation’s “mental disease”—is what
led him to become a painter:
Those of my generation in China were born sick, with a mental disease. It was truth
versus life: If you cheat, you live; if you defend the truth, you die. Our psychological
damage is a deep darkness, something you can’t see through. Some use their scars to
become heroes, others give up hope altogether, and a few try to get better, to understand.
One reason I have chosen to paint with brush and ink is because my touch cannot lie to
the paper. Each stroke is my record. In healing, the most important element is patience…
Perhaps that is why I paint the way I do.
Moreover, Liu Dan’s choice of a classical Chinese medium may be viewed as politically
charged. His ink paintings relate not only in style, but also in purpose, to the literati tradition of
upholding the virtues of the past as cynical commentary on the present. Since the Yuan dynasty
(1279–1368), when native Han Chinese scholars protested the foreign Mongol rule by creating a
stylistic code for ink painting that read as longing for the dynasties of China’s former glory,
wenren identified themselves with the social minority and political op- position, and selected
their styles in part to criticize the establishment. In his rejection of socialist realism and pursuit
of the literati aesthetic, Liu Dan asserts that Mao’s cultural policy, epitomized by the Cultural
Revolution’s attack against the “Four Olds,” was a gross folly. Indeed, as Sherman E. Lee writes:
“Much of the People’s Republic’s strictures against elitism and encouragement of popular art can
be traced not necessarily to Marxist theory but to a reaction against the wenren tradition.”4 By
identifying with the very culture that Mao wanted to eradicate, Liu Dan’s painting seeks to prove
that self-expression survives ideology and art survives political power.
In 1968, the violence in China’s cities resulted in the army’s intervention. In a massive relocation
operation, the central government sent millions of out-of-school teenagers to the countryside to
work among the peasants as “intellectual youths.” In a convoy of hundreds, Liu Dan and his
sister were transported to a rural agricultural commune in nearby Jurong, where he spent the next
ten years farming with buffaloes in the rice paddies.
For Liu Dan, the years in the countryside (1968–78) were a time of intense self-examination,
self-study, and private artistic training. Like other intellectual youths deprived of their families,
homes, and schools, Liu Dan began to reflect on the failure of the Cultural Revolution and to
question the system that incited it. As he recalls: “Tragedy leads to doubt. I started having
independent thoughts, and finally realized that I was alone. That is where my freedom was born.”
Salvaging books stolen from the Red Guard raids, Liu Dan became an avid reader of classical
Chinese and modern European literature, philosophy, history, and aesthetics. He also started to
draw again, copying images by Renaissance masters, and continued to practice calligraphy and
some ink painting. Recognized as a talented young artist, he was occasionally “loaned” by the
commune to the Jiangsu Provincial Museum for various art-restoration projects. By 1973, when
he became the private student of the influential Nanjing painter Ya Ming, Liu Dan was
committed to a life of art.
The Academy Years
Ya Ming (b. 1924) is among the most prominent guohua painters in Communist Chinese history.
His depiction of modern subject matter in a traditional medium demonstrated the Party line on
Chinese painting so perfectly during the Hundred Flowers Movement that in 1957 he was
appointed vice-director of the new Jiangsu Painting Academy. The celebrated Nanjing master Fu
Baoshi (1904–1965) was director of the academy, and Qian Songyan (1898–1985) was the other
vice-director. Under their leadership, the academy rose quickly to become one of the most
prestigious conservatories for the study and practice of traditional painting in China.
Liu Dan first met Ya Ming in the early 1970s and was so impressed by his brush skills and
passion for Chinese art that he abandoned realist drawing and took up ink painting instead. When
Liu Dan had the occasion to show Ya Ming his studies, the master honored Liu by inviting him
to become his studio assistant. “Liu was my youngest apprentice,” Ya Ming recently recalled. “I
knew at once that he was a dragon talent, an artist to reckon with someday.”5 With Ya Ming’s
help, Liu Dan subsequently entered the newly-named Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy in
1978.6 Within a short time, Liu Dan was singled out as a future star of contemporary Chinese
painting. He was twenty-five years old, and his career seemed assured.
But Liu was disillusioned. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (Mao died in 1976), he
struggled to articulate the potential for traditional painting in the context of contemporary China,
and simultaneously dreamed of creating an art that was original and international. One of the
problems he faced at the academy was the official attitude toward guohua itself, and its mangled
history in the modern era.
By whatever name, ink painting had been the object of repeated attacks since before the fall of
the Qing. In the early 1900s, the urgency to modernize and reform China’s decaying institutions
prompted some artists and liberal intellectuals to criticize the reactionary and antipopulist values
of traditional Chinese painting, and to advocate renewal through adopting Western painting
styles, much as Japan had after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Leading modern artists
subsequently synthesized European realism with Chinese techniques to create the so-called Antitraditionalist and Westernized Chinese Painters movements that were active in the pre-Liberation
decades.7 When the Communists came to power in 1949, traditional Chinese painting and the
entire social order it represented came under fire as the propaganda bureaucracy adopted Soviet
socialist realism as the official style of the proletariat revolution. As Julia F. Andrews has
written: “One of the art world’s major issues in the 1949–1957 period was what role, if any,
traditional Chinese painting should play in the new society. The fundamental question was
whether traditional painting should be preserved, reformed, or simply eradicated.”8 Temporarily,
Chinese painting survived in the hands of those like Ya Ming who managed to manipulate
superb technique to depict contemporary subjects with enough realism so that Mao’s masses—
the worker, peasant, and soldier—would still be served. Others, like the influential master Zhang
Daqian (1899–1983), escaped abroad.
During the Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese painting was once again identified as an
enemy of progress. Besides the willful destruction of cultural properties and private collections,
thousands of Chinese artists died, committed suicide, or lost their minds in the decade of violent
attacks against classicism and self-expression.9 Finally, with Deng Xiaoping’s moderate reforms
leading to the “open door” policy of 1979, Liu Dan’s own generation discovered the EuroAmerican avant-garde and proclaimed that traditional painting was “dead.”10 Discredited by a
score of cultural and political forces as backward, elitist, and now obsolete, the official world of
Chinese painting had naturally become an arena of conflicting positions—some righteously
de-fending, others damning, the purpose and direction of guohua. It would take Liu Dan a
decade before he found his own answer to this profound dilemma.
During his formal studies at the academy (1978–81), Liu Dan pursued eclecticism over
academicism, going beyond his lineage of twentieth-century ink painting to earlier art of the
Northern Song, Yuan, and Ming periods. Ya Ming’s influence was less stylistic than
philosophical: Believing that tradition, nature, and human beings are the artist’s three best
teachers, Ya’s deep confidence in the rich and superior achievements of Chinese art was never
shaken by the dominance of modern Western art. As a student, Liu Dan also traveled to the
Dunhuang caves to study their repository of early Buddhist painting. His work from this period
depicts both classical and contemporary subjects rendered in line and ink wash.
Between 1979 and 1981, the heady years surrounding Beijing’s Democracy Wall, Liu Dan
helped organize an underground literary and arts journal of Nanjing’s nascent democracy
movement.11 Swept up in the tide of open political dissent, he emerged as a provocative figure in
the pro-Western independent youth art movement, promoting artists such as Pollock and Warhol
whose work was virtually unknown until after Mao’s death. He experimented with Dada ideas as
well, composing love poems of deconstructed ideograms and making word-paintings of nonsense
calligraphy. Liu was simultaneously a traditional artist of great promise at the academy, and a
leader of those who pursued modern art forms based on Euro-American concepts of
independence, individualism, and radical will. Inadvertently, he was sometimes criticized for his
dual allegiance.12
During this period of liberalization, Liu Dan met and married an American scholar and theater
artist, Elizabeth Wichmann, well-known in China as the first foreign woman to perform in the
Peking Opera. Overcoming tremendous social and political opposition, the couple left China and
moved to America in August 1981. They settled in Honolulu, where Wichmann pursued her
academic career t the University of Hawaii.
Aceldama
Coming to America freed Liu Dan from the parochial confines of the Chinese art world but also
forced him to start his career over from an entirely new vantage point. “In China, life is easy but
not free. In the United States, life is free but not easy.” At a loss, Liu Dan was disappointed to
find that the most creative time for the legendary international avant-garde had passed, leaving in
its wake a bourgeois establishment and an overblown market. Although he followed the
American art news and always felt connected to twentieth- century art, Liu recognized that
modernism was over. It would be ludicrous, he thought, for a Chinese artist to try and catch up
now. The alternative world of traditional Chinese painting in America was also discouraging.
Most experts of classical Chinese painting had little tolerance for contemporary innovation, and
the general public couldn’t distinguish good work from paintings at the local Chinese Friendship
Store. “Here in America,” he finally realized, “you have to create your own revolution.”
During his first years in Honolulu, Liu Dan experimented with fusing abstract brush-and-ink
painting with realist drawing in a series of portraits and landscapes, some inspired by the volcano
Haleakala. Reviewing his first solo show in Honolulu, critic Marcia Morse wrote: “Liu helps us
see that the distinction between line and form, between drawing and painting is, at times, an
arbitrary one. What matters is the expressiveness of the work.”13
Technically superb, Liu Dan’s eclectic style had not yet resolved the problem of how to integrate
Chinese and Western, traditional and modern modes of expression on a deeper level, beyond
surface imagery. He was fortunate at this time to meet the well-known connoisseurs of Far
Eastern art, David Kidd and Yasuyoshi Morimoto, who befriended Liu and encouraged him to
“hold the brush.” In 1984, he also met Hugh Moss, the author of several books on Chinese art
and a prominent dealer and collector of contemporary Chinese paintings. Moss became Liu’s
patron and encouraged him to “Forget everything … and paint what is in your heart now.”14
These influences, together with what his wife recognized as Liu Dan’s deep attachment to
making art with what he loves most—the Chinese brush, ink, and paper—finally led him to
commit to the creation of his dreams.15
The first major work in Liu Dan’s mature oeuvre is Aceldama (fig. 1). This monumental
landscape is composed of six hanging scrolls and one longer handscroll that hangs vertically and
extends outward in front of the painting onto the floor. This format may be as radical in the
history of Chinese painting as Frank Stella’s shaped canvases are in modern art. It depicts an
uninhabitable terrain in a supernatural process of crystallization and molten ruin, staged in a zone
that hovers between heaven and earth. The landscape forms are constructed of transparent layers
of monochrome ink brush strokes and light wash on xuan paper. The bottom half of the
handscroll is painted with red cinnabar ink, perhaps referring to the literal meaning of Aceldama
as “field of blood”—a biblical reference to the land bought with the money Judas had been paid
in return for betraying Christ. Twice in China, Liu Dan was labeled Judas the betrayer. The
traditional Chinese painting establishment accused him of promoting too much Western art, and
the modern art movement accused him of abandoning its cause by leaving China. After years of
reflection, Liu Dan responded to these charges with Aceldama and set the direction of his future
work.16
Aceldama was a summation and a breakthrough for Liu Dan. It asserted his position in
contemporary Chinese painting and also went far beyond the limits of those conventions. It is
significant that the landscape was featured in Liu’s solo exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of
Arts in 1989, which was curated by James Jensen whose specialty is modern art. (Jensen is now
associate director of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, and organized Liu Dan’s exhibition
there in early 1993.) The unworldly crescendo of ground and space, fire and mountains, bodies
of water and clouds make Aceldama a vision that the modern mind can recognize as a real or
imagined apocalypse. Chinese in style and technique, Liu Dan’s first major painting is
shockingly contemporary in spirit.
On Technique
With Aceldama, Liu Dan establishes his new process of painting as well as aesthetic concept. His
first step in preparing the large-scale paintings presented in this exhibition is to draw a detailed
pencil study. The refinement of Liu’s preparatory drawings reveals his foundation in classical
Western art, his mastery of chiaroscuro, and his dependence on graphite to develop his initial
idea (cat. no. 5). Liu then grids the drawing and transfers these marks onto a sheet of paper
attached to a wall. He sketches the outlines in charcoal and, consulting his pencil study often,
gradually begins to fill the surface with ink.
Ink, the fundamental material of Chinese painting, is made of pine soot and glue mixed into a
paste that is formed into decorative sticks. The ink is prepared by grinding the stick, in
combination with water, on an ink slab that is usually made of a special kind of stone. This
remarkable material produces a pure, lustrous black and, when diluted, a full spectrum of values
up to the palest gray. According to legend, this subtlety was lost on Picasso who once showed his
Chinese ink studies to Zhang Daqian. “You have the power of the brush,” the master told
Picasso, “but your black is just black.” For Liu, ink represents all colors and, except for cinnabar
red (which is technically ink), he shuns the use of pigments and its association with popular
artisan-level work. Aceldama, like all of Liu’s recent painting, is intentionally a spectacle of the
Chinese monochrome universe.
The tool of Chinese painting is the brush, whose tapered form and pliant character have been
refined over thousands of years. In Chinese aesthetics, the brush stroke is an “imprint of the
mind,” a sign of the artist’s intellectual, psychological, and spiritual state of being. Liu Dan
identifies with this approach, respecting the brush stroke as “an action that refines and matures
the soul.” In particular, Liu’s gradual buildup of dry, short brush strokes relates to an elite
tradition within literati painting, but differs from the fast and fluid calligraphic line that
influenced so many modern Western artists from Jackson Pollock to Brice Marden. Liu’s
monumental scale forces a reinterpretation of this other, more introspective brush technique and
turns its traditionally intimate format into an environmental set.
Paper has been preferred over silk as the principal ground for ink painting since the literati ideals
were theorized in the fourteenth century. This is because paper connotes calligraphy and
learning, and because handmade xuan paper in particular has remarkable qualities of absorbency,
taking up to ten layers of ink without losing surface texture. It also comes in single sheets as
large as five by twelve feet. A master of these timeless materials, Liu extracts from them a
unique purpose and bends the literati aesthetic to unprecedented and hallucinatory forms,
creating a world that could be imagined only in the late twentieth century.
The Landscape Paintings
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government repressed a month-long peaceful demonstration for
democracy that had involved millions of students, intellectuals, and workers, by rolling in the
tanks and opening fire on the mass of unarmed civilians camping in Tiananmen Square. The
world focussed on Beijing in horror as all the hope and achievements of the last decade of
reforms were crushed. Following the Tiananmen massacre, Liu Dan was involved like thousands
of other overseas Chinese in organizing support and relief for the families of pro-democracy
leaders, many of whom were imprisoned or in hiding. But his good work did not alleviate his
emotional depression. “When June 4th happened, something connective broke. I felt anger and
darkness for the tragedy of China, and for my own life situation.” After several months of
turmoil, Liu resolved two things: He applied for U.S. citizenship, and he began work on a sixtyfoot long painting that would take him a year of intensive work to complete.
Ink Handscroll (cat. no. l) is a visionary landscape: Its forms and images allude to nature but are
the mind’s invention. Like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (which it often reminds people of), this
mural-size handscroll is a heretical symphony about the calamitous and ethereal manifestations
of nature. Fire, water, air, and rock converge in a teeming process of creation and destruction, the
configurations of their complex pulse charting the cosmic energy of permanence and change. In
a departure from Chinese landscape conventions, there are no sages traveling through this
Boschian place, and no pagodas, boats, or bridges festoon its fantastic gorges. Conjuring both
volcanic genesis and psychic phenomena, its realism represents rather the endless transmutation
of states of being. White space usually functions as the void, water or sky element in Chinese
painting, but here white and black, negative and positive spaces are interchangeable, one edge
giving form to multiple illusions in a quasi-cubistic construction.
Imaginary landscape has been a subject of Chinese painting since at least the Tang dynasty (618–
907)—long before the European Romantics seized upon wilderness as a means of exploring a
private spiritual world in art. Throughout the history of literati culture, the area around Nanjing
was a source of both the “orthodox” and “individualist” schools devoted to painting nature as
mindscape. One representative painter of the latter was Gong Xian (ca. 1620–1689), whose
masterpiece, A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, invites comparison with Liu Dan’s Ink
Handscroll (fig. 2).
A brooding poet, Gong Xian was by nature a loner and an eccentric who chose reclusion as a
way of life. Surviving the Manchu conquest of China, he was among those Ming loyalists who
referred to painting as “silent poetry” and used art as veiled political protest and psychological
self-defense against an increasingly violent and menacing world.17 His special brush technique,
whereby overlapping layers of dots, texture strokes, and finally ink wash construct a surface of
extraordinary tonal range, is similar in its mottled, chiaroscuro effect to Liu Dan’s. (In fact, some
scholars maintain that Gong Xian may have been influenced by European shading, which makes
his affinity with Liu even more striking.18) Gong Xian’s dense composition that occupies the
entire image, his weird forms that defy and transcend reality, and his desolate vision—what
James Cahill has described as this painting’s “oppressive grandeur”—are elements that resonate
with Liu’s Ink Handscroll despite the fact that Gong Xian was never a direct influence upon him.
Liu’s gigantic scale and pure abstraction show how totally he transforms the tradition: Ink
Handscroll occupies an area that is thirty times larger, and offers no signs of the real world
Classical in format and composition, Ink Landscape (cat. no. 2) is a large hanging scroll of a
towering mountainous form whose peaks seem to be decomposing into ether. Liu’s refined brush
technique creates a structurally ambiguous realm of light and dark, flat and refracted spaces
which describe a majestic presence that is simultaneously solid and void. If the ideal of Chinese
painting is to capture the “breath of life” that permeates, animates, and motivates the universe,
this mountain made of seething air does just that.
As a work of a mature artist in the ink tradition, Liu Dan’s Ink Landscape may be understood as
his formal response to the great influence of the Northern Song monumental landscape painters.
Consciously or not, Liu’s hanging scroll thus evokes the well-known masterpiece Early Spring,
which depicts a central mountain with lakes in the foreground, by Guo Xi (ca. 1020–1090), one
of the founding artists and theorists of Chinese landscape painting (fig. 3). Like Liu’s hanging
scroll, Early Spring presents an alternative world composed of structural ambiguities and shifting
masses of solids and voids. In both, objective reality is transcended to create “visual association
and psychological projection.”19 Where Liu departs from orthodoxy, however, is in his unique
configurations of forms within forms, planes within planes, and the surrealistic suggestion that
these elements are clues to multiple levels of fantastic imagery.
The Rock Paintings
In August 1991, Liu Dan visited Hugh Moss at his summer estate in West Sussex, England.
There, he saw and was captivated by a rock (fig. 4). In a gesture of significant generosity, his
patron gave the lake-bed rock to Liu, who named it Tianlai-shi, Heavenly Sound Stone. Back in
his Honolulu studio, Liu Dan embarked on a second series of paintings, devoted now to the rock
in Chinese art.20
Fantastic rocks have been a subject of passionate connoisseurship in court and literatus circles
since at least the Tang dynasty, when several great gardens boasted magnificent natural
sculptures of macrocosmic symbolism. Found in lake beds or underground, the coveted stones
were appreciated for their weird, twisted shapes and faceted surfaces suggesting an infinite array
of organic and psychic phenomena. Ranging in size from a few inches to some fifty feet, the
stones were sometimes chiseled by hand to enhance their sculptural qualities and moved great
distances to serve the fancy of a certain petrophile. The famous twelfth-century catalogue of
rocks, Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest, describes the features of certain stones dredged from
Lake Tai that are similar to Liu Dan’s Heavenly Sound Stone:
They are hard and glossy, with strange configurations and hollow “eyes” and twisting
peaks…. They have a net of raised patterns all over their surfaces covered with small
cavities, worn by the action of wind and waves. These are called “pellet nests.” When
these stones are tapped, they resound lightly.21
As a hard, permanent substance that expresses constant change and transformation, the rock is
the ultimate manifestation of the dualistic Chinese cosmos. Rocks were spoken of as “roots of
the clouds” and “the body-form of mountains,” and were judged, like all forms of life and
culture, by their quality of spirit (qi). One of the favorite stories in Chinese stone-lore is that of
the Song literatus Mi Fu and his “Elder Brother Stone,” a stunning rock that so possessed him
that he bowed to it upon his first encounter (fig. 5). Bizarre rocks in garden settings were a
common theme in painting, and their occasional depiction as single objects was regarded as a
form of magic landscape. In Liu Dan’s opinion, the potential of weird stones as a subject of
abstract expression reached its most advanced level in an ink handscroll by Wu Bin (ca. 1568–
1621). Ten Views of a Fantastic Rock is a multiple portrait of a twisted, sinewy rock isolated
without ground and shown from several different angles, a morphology of spirit matter.22
But Liu Dan’s interpretation is far more radical. His two rock paintings in this exhibition, each
some five by twelve feet, are giants in the canon, partly because of their impressive size, partly
because of the complexity of their surface textures (cat. nos. 3, 4). Their contorted and sensual
forms suggest a myriad things—bones, waves, petals, monsters, eros—but, finally, these works
assert themselves in contemporary art as a unique form of supernaturalist abstract painting.
In each rock painting, Liu Dan inscribes a colophon in formal kaishu script. Both colophons cite
different accounts of the same story about the famous Ming literatus Mi Wanzhong and his
attempt to move a huge rock from the mountains to his garden, known as Shao Yuan, on the
outskirts of Beijing. When the rock did not budge, Mi wrote a letter to the rock imploring it to
come share in the pleasures of his garden. Another scholar, posing as the rock, replied to Mi
Wanzhong in a letter full of classical references supporting the reasons why he (the rock) wanted
to stay in the mountains. Several other scholars of the period engaged in this wonderful debate,
which Liu quotes, and the rock stayed put. The story continued in the Qing dynasty when the
Qian Long emperor, harnessing all the horsepower at his imperial command, determined to move
the legendary rock to his own garden. He succeeded. In Heavenly Sound Stone II, Liu includes
passages from the poems the emperor composed about this provocative situation, focusing on the
issues of the relationship between man and nature.
Rock painting is an anomaly in the recent history of Chinese art, probably because of its
associations with “bourgeois” and “reactionary” literati taste. In one way, Liu Dan’s choice of
this symbolic subject is incidental: “Rocks are just another subject. Cezanne used apples, van
Gogh used sunflowers. It’s all the same problem of saying something new with what is given.”
In another way, Liu Dan is conscious that his choice is about giving life to a lost sense of beauty,
and new meaning to an ancient intelligence. His working title for the rock paintings was Zuori
huanghua (The Luxury of Yesterday), a poetic reference to the poignant death of exquisite
things. As an expatriate Chinese and witness to a brutal time in history, Liu understands all too
well what his friend David Kidd wrote upon his return to China after an absence of thirty years:
“Here in Peking I had the feeling that I had seen life more clearly and death more clearly,
whereas in the indulgent world of the West, with its illusion of continuity and safety, outlines
were blurred, concealing the rude truth: that life for us, as for them, is short, and that the struggle
to preserve human dignity never ceases.”23
***
Most likely, Liu Dan’s ink painting will become increasingly recognized by the Chinese painting
establishment for its brilliant contribution to the tradition. Liu’s position in the more international
arena of contemporary art is less assured, however. As an Asian American artist at “the cutting
edge” of creative expression, Liu could be a candidate for such issue-oriented group exhibitions
of contemporary American art as the Whitney Biennial. Yet, ironically, the expectation of artists
of color in the context of the multiculturalist critique is that they should produce art whose
content is politically anti-mainstream but whose media and aesthetic are more or less mainstream
avant-garde. The installations of such Chinese artists as Gu Wenda and Huang Yongping, both of
whom have achieved considerable recognition in the United States, Europe, and Japan, are
critically successful partly because their conceptual style is international and their work can be
viewed as having an exotic yet aggressive social message. Superficially, Liu Dan’s art might
look conservative, even romantic by comparison, disassociated from the issues of contemporary
art and aloof from the community of his own generation of mainland Chinese artists working
abroad.
In fact, Liu Dan’s ink painting poses a different, deeper challenge to the conventional politics of
art-world exclusion. Although regret for his homeland and the complex identity of being a
minority in America are ongoing issues, the real subject of Liu Dan’s work is his conscious
choice of Chinese ink painting as the medium of self-expression. Independent of trends, he
believes “it doesn’t matter if art is old or new. Art ‘must be unique.” With his large ink-on-paper
works, Liu intentionally proposes a new format for modern painting and demonstrates that
“traditional” Chinese painting—which has never stopped evolving—is vital and unlimited. In
Liu Dan’s hands, the culture of brush and ink becomes universal, an affective way to
communicate the mind of our age.
List of Figures
1. Liu Dan, Aceldama, 1987. Ink on paper, overall 96 x 258 in. with descending handscroll
156 in. Collection of the artist
2. Gong Xian, A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, ca. 1670. Ink on paper, 24 x 39 in.
Museum Reitberg Zürich, Charles A. Drenowatz Collection
3. Guo Xi, Early Spring, dated 1072. Ink and pigment on silk, 62 x 42 ½ in. National Palace
Museum, Taipei
4. Tianlai-shi (Heavenly Sound Stone)
5. Ren Yi, Scholar on a Rock, 19th century. Ink and color on alum paper, 7 ½ x 21 3/16 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, in memory of
LaFerne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986
Originally published in Alternative Visions: Liu Dan and Hiromitsu Morimoto. Reproduced by
permission of the publisher.
For their contributions to this essay, I wish to thank Yasuyoshi Morimoto, Hugh Moss and Dr. Reiko Tomii. —A.M.
1
Liu Dan, interview with the author. All quotes by the artist in the following text were recorded at interviews
conducted during 1992, in Honolulu, Tokyo, and New York.
2
As Julia F. Andrews explains, guohua is a recent term that has been used in the People’s Republic of China to
categorize any work painted in ink, with or without color, on a ground of Chinese paper or silk. It is used to
distinguish Western-style oil painting (xiyanghua) from modern Chinese works in traditional media, and is usually
translated as “traditional Chinese painting” even when such painting is not traditional in style at all. See Julia F.
Andrews, “Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the Anti-Rightist Campaign,” The Journal for Asian
Studies 49, no. 3 (Aug. 1990): 556–57.
3
For a statistical breakdown of the geographical origins of Chinese artists, supporting the theory that its greatest
artists came from the Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and the Lake Tai and Huang-shan Mountain areas, see Marilyn
and Shen Fu, Studies in Connoisseurship: Chinese Paintings from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection in New York
and Princeton (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 1973): 1–15.
4
Sherman E. Lee, “Chinese Painting: 1350 to 1650” in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the
Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum
of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980): xxxvii.
5 Ya Ming, interview with the author, 29 Dec. 1992, Dongshan, Jiangsu Province.
6
Liu Dan’s family did not have the proper “revolutionary” credentials for him to enter the prestigious academy in its
first year to open after the Cultural Revolution. Ya Ming had to personally persuade the Jiangsu government
officials to have Liu Dan accepted in the school.
7
Lawrence Wu, “Kang Youwei and the Westernization of Modem Chinese Art,” Orientations 21, no. 3 (Mar.
1990): 46–53.
8
Andrews: 558–59.
9
For accounts of what happened to several prominent Chinese artists during the Cultural Revolution, see Joan
LeBold Cohen, The New Chinese Painting 1949–1986 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987).
10
In 1985, Li Xiaoshan, an artist and art historian, wrote an essay entitled “My View of Chinese Ink Painting” in
Jiangsu Huakan (Jiangsu Art Journal) in which he declared Chinese ink painting was “in its eleventh hour” and
should be abandoned in both theory and practice. See an unpublished article by Geoffrey M. K. Bonnycastle, “The
Avant-Garde in Contemporary Chinese Art,” 1989/92.
11
The short-lived journal was Renjian (Among the People)
12
Elizabeth Wichmann, unpublished commentary on Liu Dan, 1986. My impressions of this period are also based
on interviews with artists who knew Liu Dan before his move to America: Wu Yi, Shen Ronger, Huang Suning, and
Chen Danqing.
13
Marcia Morse, “Paintings, Portraits and Paper,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 31July 1983.
14
Hugh Moss, unpublished letter to Liu Dan, 11Sept. 1987.
15
. Wichmann writes: “Liu was drawn to Western art, excited by its range of materials and their expressive potential
… But his love for traditional Chinese painting made it impossible for him to divorce himself from his Chinese
brush—the exercise of traditional painting technique was not something that he could lay aside.” Unpublished
commentary: 2.
16
Jennifer Saville; Works by Liu Dan, exh. brochure (Honolulu: Academy of Art, 1989): 3.
17
Wen C. Fong, Images of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 1984): 193–99.
18 James Cahill, Fantastics and Eccentrics in Chinese Painting (New York: The Asia Society, 1967): 69.
19
Fong: 48.
20
For a full account of the exchange between Liu and Moss, see Hugh Moss, Ink: The Art of Liu Dan (Hong Kong:
Umbrella, 1993).
21
See John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China House Gallery,
China Institute in America, 1986): 22.
22
For an illustration of Wu Bin’s handscroll, see Fine Chinese Paintings, Sale 5948 (New York: Sotheby’s, 6 Dec.
1989): cover and lot 39.
23
David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988): 204.