Proud and Shy

Proud and Shy, a portrait of a red and a black poppy, was painted by Liu Dan in 1999 for his first solo exhibition, Still Expression: Recent Flower Paintings by Liu Dan, at the Chinese Porcelain Company in New York in 2000. Two poppies, one straight and one bent as a loop intertwining with each other, elegantly stand at the centre of the painting, adorned by the artist’s meticulous calligraphy in Slender Gold style first invented by Emperor Song Huizong. Liu Dan’s poppies occupy a unique time and position in his life and career. Beginning with a series of flower paintings in the late 1990s when he lived in New York, Liu has not painted many other small flower paintings after this period.
The poppy encompasses an array of uses and symbolic meanings across different cultures and traditions. From representing beauty to remembrance to modern medicine, it possesses robust visual and practical qualities and ironically contrasts with the humble presence of this small, elegant yet resilient flower. One wonders if Liu Dan was attracted to the contradicting qualities of the poppy flower in the first place.
Liu Dan distils his subject matter into a purely visual experience - one so beautiful that it becomes impossible to forget. Since blossoms are transient beings, the flowers depicted by Liu Dan appear more beautiful and long-lasting than in reality. As the artist wrote in his artist statement that “whether it is from a life sketch or from a photograph, [the flowers’] shapes are formed initially in order ‘not to forget.’ Now what has been painted has become the ‘remembered’.”