Liu Dan 刘丹

Born in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in 1953, Liu Dan studied the Confucian classics, poetry, painting and calligraphy from his grandfather at an early age. After the Cultural Revolution, he studied traditional painting under Ya Ming at the newly reopened Jiangsu Academy of Chinese Painting from 1978 to 1981. He moved to Hawaii in 1981 where he studied western art and matured as an artist before moving to New York in 1992 and returning to China in 2006. Both his early years training in traditional Chinese art and philosophy and his later twenty-five years in the United States has greatly contributed to his very personal and sophisticated style. Liu Dan's ink paintings, whether of scholar's rocks, poppy flowers, or old cypress trees in the Forbidden City, are all fastidiously conceived complex works which highlight his concern to emphasize underlying compositional structure over virtuoso expressions of showy brushwork.