Lalan (Xie Jing-lan) was a talented Chinese-French artist who successfully integrated into her work her bi-cultural background of China and France with interdisciplinary study in music, dancing, and painting.
Lalan was born in Guiyang city, Guizhou, China, and grew up in a beautiful suburb at Ge Hill, not far from the famous West Lake in Hangzhou. Her father loved and indulged in Chinese poetry, literature, painting and music, all of which influenced Lalan’s art. Her wealthy and open-minded family allowed her to attend American missionary school and to learn the piano, and later she went to Hengzhou Art College to continue her music education. In 1948 Lalan went to France with husband Zao Wou-ki, a painter. She took advanced music study in composition, and the couple immersed themselves in the beauty of Paris and enjoyed numerous cultural activities. She even started to learn dance after gaining inspiration from a documentary film on Martha Graham, master of modern dance. Her training in music and dance, and her participation in her husband’s artistic career would later all profoundly influence her paintings.
Lalan started to paint after the break-up of her marriage to Zao Wou-ki in 1957. Her artworks contained elements of Chinese culture that had developed over thousands of years, and characteristics of the artistic developments of the second half of the twentieth century in Paris. With a spontaneous, open style to represent dialogues and exchanges between two different cultures, Lalan conducted her artwork at speed, never making sketches or studies for her works. She fluently manipulated her brush with trained body control learned from dance to freely and romantically express her imagination. Her painting style had started from abstraction with influences from calligraphy, and then transformed into tangible, landscape forms, before returning again to abstraction. Symbolic elements of Chinese inscriptions, cosmic energy embedded in Chinese landscape painting through the artist’s consciousness, and the natural surroundings of the real world were all integrated into Lalan’s artworks. Accumulated life experience gave Lalan a mature insight, which particularly showed in the excellent arrangement and control of lines in her paintings, which perfectly represented her mind and spirit.
This exhibition is showing 60 exquisite paintings by Lalan at her various art developing stages. It is to enable the people of Taiwan to recognize this outstanding artist and, at the same time, to express appreciation of her great achievements in art.