The exhibition ‘Fragrance of the Mind: A Retrospective of Lalan’s Work’ displayed 92 pieces of abstract painting by the versatile French-Chinese artist Lalan.
Xie Jinglan (1921 – 1995), also known as Lalan, was a French-Chinese female artist who devoted herself to the fields of painting, music and dance. In France, Lalan was renowned of her abstract paintings. Some of her works are permanently collected by the French Ministry of Culture.
Lalan primarily studied soprano at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 1948, and studied musical composition and dance at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris. She was a recognised composer and was formally admitted into the Music, Lyrics, Composition & Publishing Society of France in 1961. She had also studied modern dance at the AmericanCommunity Center. These artistic talents had rendered Lalan an extraordinary creative artist.
Lalan came to know about modern paintings from her former husband Zhao Wuji, a renowned Chinese painter. Encouraged by her second husband Marcel Van Thienen, a French musician and sculptor, she picked up painting and pursued her career as a painter for almost four decades.
In Lalan’s early works, she sought inspirations from Chinese ancient characters and transformed the elements into oil paintings with thickly coated pigment and bold colour. Gradually, she shifted her way from individualism embodied abstraction to peaceful landscape as to create calm and joyful aura for people. She drew ideas from the hazy landscape paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties and the philosophy of Chuang-tzu. Specific subjects such as the moon and mountain peaks began to appear in the works of this phase. Nevertheless, Lalan returned to abstraction in her later period. Unlike her earlier abstract paintings, the lines in her works appeared gentle and rhythmic. Meanwhile, she tried to combine music, dance and painting to perform her experimentation of ‘integrated art’ – playing electronic music she had composed and performing modern dance which tied in her landscape painting. In 1973, the French Ministry of Culture granted Lalan a special award scholarship for research of ‘integrated art’.
Lalan was avant-garde and yet always stayed faithful to her true feelings. She said, ‘The act of painting is driven by an inner voice and motions from within’. Through Lalan’s work, viewers may see how this lady merged the melody of her music and the rhythm of her dance into her soul-touching paintings.