Foreword
LaIan, initially named Xie Jing-lan, was a Chinese-French female artist. She and her works were unfamiliar to the Chinese, whereas in France, she was an important Chinese abstract artist. Her exhibitions were mounted at many prestigious galleries in France, and her works were added permanently to the state collection of the French Ministry of Culture. Even more extraordinarily, she not only was a master of abstract painting but excelled in the fields of electronic music and modern dance. In the 1970s, she integrated and displayed these three in a single space, broke down the inherent boundaries between different types of art, and showed to the world her miraculous genius in creativity.
LaIan was born in Guizhou Province of China in 1921 and went to France with her ex-husband Zao Wou-ki in 1948. The young lady was profoundly influenced by her close relations with the New Abstractionists and by the artistic milieu in Paris after WWII. In 1957, she began to do abstract paintings. Her early works reveal evident traces of her spontaneous impulse as well as noticeable references to Chinese calligraphy.
In the 1970s, she shifted her focus to concrete themes as a response to the traditional Chinese painting. In the tableau of her works, there appeared such identifiable objects as sequestered peaks. Sometimes her composition of the corner and sides remind one of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, the landscape titans of the Southern Song Dynasty. Meanwhile, intellectual trends in the West began to exert a powerful effect on LaIan, who displayed an integration of painting, dance, and music. She called this trinity "integrated art," which has since been widely acclaimed. In the 1980s, Lalan resumed abstract painting. In contrast to her early, rich style, the works of her late years are refreshing and brisk. Her comprehension and usage of lines attained to a consummate state in which hand and mind are one and the same. Enfin, she formed her own style.
This exhibition displays many outstanding works that LaIan created in the different stages of her painterly career. It is meant not only as a review of how a distinguished female artist was made but as an opportunity for Chinese viewers to know more about the New Abstractionist painting of post-war Paris.
It is to be ardently hoped that the exhibition will be an overwhelming success!
Fang Zeng-xian
Director of the Shanghai Art Museum