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 DanBy 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 nowdefunct 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-ofschool 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 Anti-traditionalist 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 Euro-American 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 sixty-foot 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-onpaper 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 Figures1. Liu Dan, Aceldama, 1987. Ink on paper, overall 96 x 258 in. with descending handscroll

156 in. Collection of the artist2. Gong Xian, A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, ca. 1670. Ink on paper, 24 x 39 in.

Museum Reitberg Zürich, Charles A. Drenowatz Collection3. Guo Xi, Early Spring, dated 1072. Ink and pigment on silk, 62 x 42 ½ in. National Palace

Museum, Taipei4. 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.

1For their contributions to this essay, I wish to thank Yasuyoshi Morimoto, Hugh Moss and Dr. Reiko Tomii. —A.M.

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.