Lot 35. Liu Dan (B. 1953), Auspicious Cloud. Scroll, mounted, framed and glazed, ink on paper. Inscribed and signed, with one seal of the artist. Executed in 2012; 194.7 x 137.5 cm. Price realised GBP 406,400 (Estimate GBP 80,000 – GBP 120,000) © Christie's Images Ltd 2026

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist, 2012.

Literature: M. Flacks, Contemplating Rocks, London, 2013, pp. 96 and 187.

Note: The pursuit of a new visual order for Chinese landscape painting has been fundamental to Liu Dan’s artistic practice since the early 1990s. Among the foremost contemporary Chinese artists working in ink, he is widely celebrated for his metaphysical, hyper-realistic depictions of natural forms – most notably scholar’s rocks, which he has described as the ‘stem cells of Chinese landscape’. For Liu, these rocks operate as portals of the imagination, offering a passage through the cosmos from a microscopic point of view.

Executed with extraordinary precision and heightened of hyperrealism, Auspicious Cloud presents a monumental portrait of a scholar’s rock, its jagged peaks and cavernous depressions recalling the contours of mountain ridges. The work depicts a Taihu rock known as Auspicious Cloud, which the artist noted in his inscription he acquired in Beijing five years prior to the painting’s execution. Commissioned directly from Liu Dan by Marcus Flacks – who shares the artist’s longstanding fascination with scholar’s rocks – the painting carries both personal and philosophical resonance.

More than a virtuosic demonstration of painterly control, Auspicious Cloud embodies Liu’s ambition to transform a tangible object into an imagined landscape for contemplation. Balancing the monumental presence of the rock is Liu’s extraordinarily refined calligraphy, which introduces a resonant literary register through poems by the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi.

Deeply anchored in the classical tradition of Chinese ink painting, Liu nonetheless approaches the medium with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. For him, rocks constitutes a symbolic microcosm of the material world; through their meticulous transformation, he invites viewers to uncover new perspectives within the minute details of seemingly ordinary forms.

Christie's. The Flacks Family Collection II: Curtain Call, London, 12 May 2026