Page 170 - Beyond Compare Christie's Hong Kong RU WARE .pdf

BEYOND COMPARE: A Thousand Years of the Literati Aesthetic

“The physical elements in a painting can do more than simply convey the shapes of rocks and mountains.
They can also be employed in a totally non-narrative form
to transform the images into indescribable illusions,
with the aim of constructing a new order for landscape paintings other than identifiable images.”
- Liu Dan

eticulously rendered with a heightened sense of For Liu Dan, scholar’s rocks are objects of mystery and uncertainty.
Mphotorealism, Jiuhua Rock depicts an unusual rock with The organic and strange features of a small rock provide sources
slender peaks and angled crags rising from the abyss, suggesting of imagination for the artist to journey through the world from
a monumental vision of precipitous mountains at vertiginous a microscopic viewpoint, enabling him to create magnified
heights. One of the finest rocks painted by Liu Dan, it fascinates and intricate compositions that echo grand landscape paintings
the viewer with a most striking feature – the intaglio characters where one can wander from within. With an ultimate fascination
Jiu Hua inscribed in seal script on the smooth planar surface in in the structural properties of things around him, Liu Dan
the front of the rock. The two characters refer evidently to the actively removes his subjects from their original context. By
strange rock that Su Shi encountered and immortalised in a decontextualizing his subject matter, he abandons the narrative and
poem titled Mount Jiuhua in a Vessel. Creating a multi-layered and distils his paintings to become a pure visual experience.
interwoven narrative, Liu Dan’s extraordinarily fine calligraphy
Jiuhua Rock demonstrates Liu Dan’s mastery in the ink and brush
balances the composition: he moves seamlessly from the story of
genre – his dedicate and meticulous outline of the strange rock
the fabled Jiuhua Rock, the poems dedicated to it, to reflections and the layering of ink that reflects brightness and darkness
on the aesthetic discourses by Su Shi. By depicting the rock in resonate with the drawings by European Renaissance artists and
sharp focus and out of scale, Liu Dan removes it from its original later old masters. He uses his mastery of traditional method and
context, making it at once familiar and strange; Jiuhua Rock, with technique to free his paintings from the constraints normally
its rich intertextuality, thus offers open-ended interpretations and associated with Chinese ink paintings. He does this while
possibilities, inviting the viewer to journey through history and remaining true to the tradition, with results that are spectacularly
time. novel and contemporary. Liu Dan emphasises that his attainment
of masterly skill through self-discipline is what provides him with
In the long tradition of rock collecting and connoisseurship in
the freedom to paint according to his heart and mind. Jiuhua Rock
China, rocks have presented a microcosm of the universe on which
is therefore the culmination of the artist’s lifelong experience
the scholar could contemplate, to which renowned collectors – Su
and pursuit in art. Liu Dan’s firm belief to present a pure and
Shi and Mi Fu included – dedicated poems and essays. In the Song
fundamental visual experience and not “tell a story” allows viewers
dynasty, they were often anthropomorphised, viewed particularly
to pay attention only to what appears in front of their eyes, that is,
as vehicles for the expression of ideas and feelings regardless of
the aesthetic harmony born out of his mind, body, and paintbrush.
their form. Mi Fu had commented that Su Shi’s painting of rocks
as ‘[having] such hard edges, so peculiar, almost as if they are the
very vessel for his sorrow and melancholy’.
It is this melancholy that the story Liu Dan documents in the
inscription of Jiuhua Rock bears witness to. In 1094, on the journey
south to his place of banishment at the edge of the empire, Su
Shi travelled through Hukou in present-day Jiangxi. There, he
encountered a strange rock belonging to Li Zhengchen with the
most unusual form: its nine slender peaks reminiscent of the sacred
Mount Jiuhua (the Nine Glorious Mountains) – a miniature of
the larger reality. He thought about buying the rock with a large
sum of gold; however, circumstances of the road prevented him
from the purchase. Some eight years later, when Su Shi was on
his way back from Hainan island, he passed by Hukou again and
realised, in great sadness, that the rock had been wrested away
and disappeared. Another year had passed, Huang Tingjian visited
Hukou and remarked: ‘[the] rock is no longer here to be viewed;
and Dongpo [Su Shi] has likewise departed this world.’ The fate of Detail of Liu Dan's Jiuhua Rock
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Su Shi and the rock are thus intricately intertwined.

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