... Matter and structure are the aspects of the outside world that strike Lalan's sensitivity, motivating her to express her emotions. In this path, our friend shares the spiritual devotion of other Chinese painters who, having started from the shores of traditional painting, have reached the dangerous shores of informal painting…
…The Chinese heritage of Lalan thus led her to master non-figurative art with ease. Sometimes, she is intimate with traditional concentration, carries out with ardour and speeds a study dictated by Chinese graphics; at other times, she applies the other end of her technique and sparkled by a long inhalation, she engraves every effect of the matter…
Lalan's art is connected with a trend of Western art, sometimes it can even merge with it; but more often, it reveals the extreme sensitivity of the Chinese tradition that created the linear and chromatic schematism.
- VADIME ELISSEEFF
Chief Curator of the Guimet Museum
Extract from the exhibition brochure of “Lalan”,
Galerie R. Creuze, Paris, 1960
... What seems to be the most characteristic in her last paintings... is this mixture of strength and grace, dramatism and subtlety where, in a primary intensity, relative intensities stand out, these within that, nuancing the same matter, notes of an ascending scale. Initially, Lan-Lan possesses such raw, native matter. That is the important thing. The work of the painter consists in turning this burning coal into a diamond. And she heads towards a purification, a place where lucidity cools the fires without extinguishing them…
- EUGÈNE IONESCO
Exponent and virtual founder of the Theatre of the Absurd
Extract from the exhibition brochure of “Lalan”,
Paperback Gallery, Edinburgh, 1963
Her work combines the finest taste which she retained from her original culture, the European tradition of oil-painting, the stormy approach of lyrical abstraction and the now so fashionable brushing against the grain.
… Out if the various propositions which her Orient and our Occident could suggest to her, she instinctively retained only those which could introduce us to her imaginary landscapes wherein wanders her delicate and nostalgic spirit…
- André BERNE JOFFROY
Curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Paris
Extract from the exhibition brochure of “Lalan”,
Galerie Bellint, Paris, 1981-1982
…Lalan’s painting is a cosmogenesis. We see forms being born out of nothing, forms that emerge, float, swirl on a background of diffuse light stemming from an undefined source, but which take on at times the shape of a hazy moon or a ghostly sun. All in all, it’s the dream, the vague sensation, of a universe in the making…
Her mind is marked by a need for harmony. Since such harmony can rarely be found in immediate reality (more and more encumbered by intermediaries and interferences of all kinds), she plunges to a deeper level, goes back to the origin of things, where life is still vibration, that is, music.
… It’s not by chance, or mere coquetry, that she dedicated a painting to Edgar Varèse, and another to the poet Henri Michaux, that strange mental traveller who evokes “a vast new domain with free-flowing passages” …
- Kenneth White
Chairman of 20th Century Poetics at the University of Paris-Sorbonne 1983-1996
Extract from the exhibition catalogue of “Peintures de Lalan”, Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, 1990
…Her Far-eastern origin has had a profound influence on the artist’s painting, even more so than her primary training as a musician (Lalan is a composer). Inner landscapes and perceived realities merge in her works: large smooth, transparent or opaque beaches, of delicate hues - pink, purplish, blue, grey - subjected to imperceptible modulations to create, at times, a luminous and crystalline atmosphere, at other times, a vaporous space that is difficult for light to pierce...
- Geneviève Breerette
Honorary President of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA)
Extract from “À Travers Les Galeries”,
originally published in Le Monde, 28 April 1971