Lalan’s Metaphysical Journey Through Her Artistic Practice
‘In my own creations, the action of painting is carried by the sound and inner movement of the body’. —Lalan
(Tang and Colombel, 1990, p. 5)
Xie Jinglan (1921–95), nicknamed Lalan, was an artist who paved her search into spirituality through the oeuvre she composed, choreographed, performed, and painted. An inspirational figure who left her legacy in the form known as Integrated Art, she is one of the most exceptional female abstract painters in Chinese contemporary art history.
Lalan was born in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, during a turbulent time after the May 4th movement in 1919 and the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in the summer of 1921. She was brought up in a prestigious family; her grandfather was a famous scholar and her father a traditional Chinese literati member. In the late 1930s, Xie Jinglan enrolled in a distinguished American missionary school, Hongdao Girls’ School. She explored her interest and potential in music and dance through the progressive, nontraditional curriculum. Her father treasured her talents and bought a piano from an American family specifically for her to practice. In 1935, at the age of 15, Lalan studied at the Hangzhou National College of Art. The school’s first principal was Lin Fengmian (1900–91), one of the first Chinese artists to study in France. Yet its curriculum deviated from the French approach and was more American in style, advocating freedom of expression (Zheng, 1934, p. 1179). There, Lalan met Zao Wouki (1921–2013), who came from a prominent family. She was quickly smitten with Zao’s talent and vision towards aesthetic persuasion. The two shared a passion for the arts and similar backgrounds of upbringing and education. They were engaged in 1940 and married in Hong Kong after Lalan enrolled in the music department of the National Art College in Chongqing. Two years later, Lalan gave birth to their only son, Zao Jialing.
Fig. 1 Xie Jinglan with Zao Wouki and his family before leaving Shanghai for Paris, 1948
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
When the war ended, Lalan enrolled in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and continued to pursue her music profession, studying voice with the notable Russian master, the basso Vladimir Shushlin (1896–1978). In the 1940s, the social norm was for women to devote themselves to their families by serving their husbands and nurturing their children. Despite the conservative atmosphere, Lalan threw herself into the limelight as one of the few women who enthusiastically explored and developed her career as a professional coloratura soprano.
In the meantime, the couple became enamoured with France’s artistic metropolis, and they began to make plans to study in Europe. The Parisian art scene featured one of the highest concentrations of abstract painters. The presence of significant numbers of different concepts signalled more a coexistence than a unified school of abstraction. This particular time gave birth to an explosion of styles of abstract painting: Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, Lyric Abstraction, Art Autre, Emotional Nonfigurative, Tachisme, and Action Painting. The painters often drew inspiration from Asian calligraphy, which represented the complete merging of word and form. In its physicality, calligraphy represents an entire cosmological worldview with the writings and inscriptions. Within a decade after the chaos of World War II, abstraction became a homogeneous quest for spirituality in art itself.
The couple embarked on the ship Andre Lebon to France, sailing to a new chapter in their life, to a place that would nourish them with the cultural richness of the time (Fig. 1). In 1948 they arrived in Marseille, and they settled down in District 14 in Paris (Thompson, 1999, p. 13). They spent most of their days exploring new art and soaking up different art forms, making friends with the Chinese-French painter Sanyu (1895–1966) and the poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984), and being advised on art. They entered the artistic circle in France when Michaux introduced them to the abstract masters Pierre Loeb, Hans Hartung, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
Fig. 2 Dual of Words, Quarrel between Light and Dark
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1963
Oil on canvas, 162 x 114 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
In 1954, Michaux introduced Lalan to the composer Edgard Varèse, known as the father of electronic music. Lalan applied for admission to the composition programme of the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris and studied electronic music under the profound Varèse, who guided her on that which is the most important: being honest to oneself, over all composition techniques. Lalan was inspired by electronic music’s vast sound resources, as well as how it differed from conventional Classical and Romantic music in tonal concepts and composition. Through the 1960s, in one of her performances titled Réveil, she incorporated sounds of birdsong, a morning chorus, a collage of percussion instruments and found noises, a football match, religious chants, and the sounds of cars turning corners.
In the following year, 1955, Lalan watched a documentary about Martha Graham, one of the pioneers of American modern dance. For Graham, dance was an exposition of introspection, the translation of emotions and the subconscious into tangible form. Lalan was strongly motivated by the Graham technique, which is dominated by the breath, torso movements, and the transformation of energy to be released and controlled. She noted that the strength brought forth from intuitive bodily movements resonated with practising Chinese calligraphy.
Since she was nurtured by a family of literati, Lalan was familiar with Chinese calligraphy, the art of brushstrokes, in which gestural movements are made to create the continuity of line; the lines of ink are the traces of motion. The calligraphic act is expressive yet restrained, and Lalan was trained to be aware of docility and strength in the body manifested through the quality of strokes. Through observations of intensely subtle nuances of execution, she retraced brushstrokes with great delicacy or force. Thus was rooted her interest in rhythmic movement.
Fig. 3 Go with the Wind
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1968
Oil on canvas, 195 x 194 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
Residing in the birthplace of Art Informel, Lalan shared similar values with fellow abstract painters, who were not interested in artistic movements but something much rarer: the authentic individual. Lalan was captivated by choreographing, composing, and performing her pieces. She unleashed her intuition and expressed herself through movement and rhythm. After Xie Jinglan divorced Zao in 1957 and married the French sculptor Marcel Van Thienen in 1958, she adopted her nickname Lalan and began her new life as an artist, extending her interests in music and dance to paintings.
Maurice Denis, the French leading artist and theoretician of the Symbolist movement, declared in 1890: ‘A painting, before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some anecdote or other, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours in a particular arrangement’ (Dietmar, 2004, p. 219). That particular arrangement is the reflection of the unconsciousness and spirituality in painting.
In the 1960s, Lalan had an expanding desire to develop this energy beyond the limits of her physical movements. She explored her individuality through pictorial space, delving into the search for the essence in painting. She painted a series of works that studied the duality of light and dark. The black-and-white veil in Dual of Words, Quarrel between Light and Dark emerges from the thick layer of vermilion in the background, as if there were a source of exhilaration, a relief far from the bodily language she habituated (Fig. 2). The thick application of paint to build a layer of darkness conveys a sense of suffocation. Visually retracing Lalan’s inscriptions of the unknown characters, a viewer perceives an obscured force, a spark of anger that expands the strokes and then disappears into a void.
Fig. 4 Ivy, Rock and the Moon
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1969
Mixed media on paper, 248 x 152 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
In her early paintings, Lalan performed an exuberance of gestures, unleashing motion in marks across the canvas. She had incubated so much energy and thoughts after absorbing the fundamental elements of electronic music and dance, and she had finally reached a phase where she could transcend her expressions in the form of painting. She could put actions into impressions. Her early works appear to echo her Chinese calligraphy practice; the sign is her only motif in this period. Thick impastos of red, orange, and black oil paint evoke flames, as if a painting were in a state of chaos, where light brings stillness and harmony. Lalan’s excitement, which had been bottled in the past decade, is implied through the vigorous motions on the canvas.
‘My first paintings are full of lyricism and extremely forceful colours; they are a kind of gestural abstraction, close to writing’. —Lalan (Thompson, 1999, p. 23)
The diptych Go with the Wind depicts an immense power that has been released (Fig. 3). Complex and suave strokes are painted with force and rhythm, rising out of the bumpy and whipped surface that has been layered with thick paint. Lalan’s sensibility is built on impulsive responses, evoking her nature as a dancer. Each stroke is painted immediately after the previous layer has dried. As if she were dancing with her powerful and spontaneous strokes, she visualises a melody that we can neither see nor describe, one that exists only in her instincts.
In 1965, Lalan felt her artistry had come to an impasse and decided to take a break from painting for a year. She then researched traditional Chinese landscape painting, intending to seek a connection between herself and her motherland, the culture once familiar to her. Lalan once said in an interview, during her presentation of the audiovisual work, The Birth of Water: ‘Born into a traditional Chinese family, [with] a Daoist father and a Buddhist mother, I considered myself, from a very young age, a revolutionary, rejecting all traditional Chinese culture’ (Tang and Colombel, 1990, p. 4). She tended to continuously think outside her percipience, accepting yet pushing the boundaries of her cultural background. Revisiting her hometown was a gateway to bringing her back to the world of the Chinese masters.
Fig. 5 Vertical Sign
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1970
Mixed media on paper, 294 x 150 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
Lalan was drawn to the aesthetic of shanshui in the Southern Song period (1127–1279), which was profoundly influenced by Daoist philosophy. She had a growing interest in landscape painting, where she found the relation between nature and Daoism, in which dao suggests beings are immortal when they are in the mountains. With this knowledge, Lalan found an answer to the spiritual question that had been lingering in her all these years: the common thread of using her intuitive energy to embrace the vital breath that exists in all living matter. To achieve a state of harmony is to deepen one’s bond with nature, through pure artistic expression.
From 1969 onwards, Lalan started producing works in the formats of long horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls. She experimented with painting on the floor; this act changed her painting methodology and allowed her to apply layers of paint in light washes without leaving many drip marks. The perception between the painter and viewer altered as well. Rather than applying the geometric, single-point perspective of Western landscape paintings, Lalan preferred to invite viewers to visually walk into the scroll’s pictorial space, to have a prolonged viewing experience, allowing their sights to wander through the mountainous heights, along a designated route to perceive the imaginary landscape. Upon her return to France in 1969, Lalan painted Ivy, Rock and the Moon (Fig. 4). This was the first in a series of paintings in which she attempted to paint motifs of the sun and moon and silhouettes of mountains. Echoing the traditional composition of Chinese landscape paintings, she painted continuous, undulating ridges with ochre cliffs under the fading moon; simultaneously, the lower part of the painting descended into mysterious abstract and pulsating strokes of intensifying greens.
Lalan’s delicate strokes and ambience recall the stylistic traditions of the Southern Song period, depicting a distanced landscape, featuring mountains made with dry calligraphic lines. The emptied middle ground in most of her paintings imitated works by Xia Gui (1195–1224), which are characterized by a sense of tranquillity and emptiness, yet their absence of matter represents a full landscape, a distanced view, or a mountain in the mist. Completeness in Daoism is thought of as empty, soft, and spontaneous. Likewise, action should be intuitive and adaptive, without the interference or intervention of a dualistic intellect (Gehrmann, n.d.).
Fig. 6 Performance view of Trivalence 3, with the painting Sudden Blue as backdrop
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1983
With music by Lalan and Van Thienen
Maison pour tous, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France
Photograph: Raphaël Dupouy
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
Beginning in the 1970s, Lalan’s paintings evoke an enduring desire to create an imaginary landscape in perfect equilibrium. As Laozi stated, in Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching, ‘Attain the ultimate emptiness; Hold on to the truest tranquillity’ (Lin, 2006, p. 53). Lalan’s Vertical Sign is a long scroll with a traditional Chinese landscape composition (Fig. 5). The layered washes of cerulean blue and bluish-grey in the background create an air of archaic calm. Mountains are formed with impetuous calligraphic strokes, hinting at hidden paths leading back to the sierra. Large gaps between the peaks in the foreground suggest distance between them. The painting is a beautiful analogy of one’s search for serenity in the woods, as well as how the symbolic cadence of brushwork creates a link to Lalan herself. This is evidence of her gestures moving along the vertical scroll, as if it were a choreographed piece.
‘I am there to materialise an overall harmony, a coherent whole’. —Lalan (Thompson, 1999, p. 59)
For her dances, Lalan never fully choreographed a piece before its performance; there was always some improvisation. She embraced the attitude of wuwei—of aimless action, of not interfering, of letting something happen—because with a goal comes the development of anxiety about the goal. Her unrehearsed choreography and impulsive strokes on canvas advocated the core value of just being without the aim of being. Daoism suggests that technique is a form of practice; to achieve perfect harmony with one’s original nature, one must search for the instinctive act to perform art. One will lose intuition and originality in adhering to a designated form that is only favourable to others.
This belief in the purity of art harks back to Martha Graham’s techniques, where the dancer’s moves are spirally connected with the torso and gravity; it is about how one connects with the floor and builds towards the action, rather than practising to fit the body to the moves. The movements shall be naturally fostered and generated with the flow, an instinctive reaction towards the body and the surroundings. Resonating with the belief in Daoist aesthetics, there is no calculation, no coercion, and no caution (Lin, 2006). Hence, bodily movement and internalized rhythm are the most genuine reflections of one’s mind. They are pure aesthetic.
Fig. 7 Remember Henri Michaux
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1984
Oil on canvas, 114 x 195 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
In the 1970s, Lalan began what she called ‘parallel research’, in which each form of art serves as a catalyst for another. At this point, she mingled the characteristics of each art form she encountered: dance, music, and painting. Spectacle, which premiered in the Galerie Jacques Desbrière, was a work of art sublimated by the wholeness and richness of Lalan’s vital energy within her body. As the first part of parallel research for this work, a painted triptych screen titled Sudden Blue was the backdrop for her performance Trivalence 3 (1983) (Fig. 6). The screen itself was a lyrical impression of the passing of time and movement, an ethereal scene where the sun/moon rose from the mist of a mountain landscape. A sizeable transparent glass sphere swung in front of the screen, casting a shadow onto it and the dancers’ floor movements. The thematic elements of light and shadow recalled one of Lalan’s symbols of the mid-1960s. The performance defined her constant search for unity amid dichotomy.
For Le Cycle, performed by the Mexican dancer Guillerma Palomare, Lalan choreographed the dance and composed five electronic music pieces. It began with the piece Heartbeat, which featured the sound of a baby’s heartbeat inside its mother’s womb, followed by Song of Life and Walk Forwards the World, with the disruptive noises of car traffic and ambience from daily life (Sotheby’s, 2019, p. 24). It closed with Serenade to Old Age and Prologue to Death (Thompson, 1999, p. 63). According to the critical reviews, each dancer was lit and appeared from either side of the stage. They moved swiftly in front of the mountain scene painted with strong calligraphic strokes. The light cast shadows of each dancer’s movements onto the imagined space, one far beyond the emblematical world.
After her parallel-research works, Lalan continued her spiritual journey by connecting her body with nature. She sought answers from the vastness of the universe, seeing the energy that runs through the cosmos and striving for a state of pure potential and perception, without prejudice or illusion. In 1980, she created The Birth of Water, and described water as ‘calm, like a pond buried in the mountains; tumultuous, like the Yellow River when it leaves its bed. Water is the mother of all things . . . Water is formless, but it adapts to all shapes’ (Tang and Colombel, 1990, p. 4).
Fig. 7 Remember Henri Michaux
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1984
Oil on canvas, 114 x 195 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
Lalan implied the essence of her aesthetic belief in Remember Henri Michaux (Fig. 7) and Water (Fig. 8). Being able to depict the flow of water is to observe the momentum within the vital energy and each moment of stillness and motion. From the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78: ‘There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water’ (Legge, 1879, p. 31). The water’s idyllic depiction is in its virtuous form; Lalan painted the ripples with intricate strokes and used gentle washes in the background to blend the strokes into the void.
In Daoism, eternity is the core matter; Dao gives life and form to all material things but is itself effable. Dao is evoked by the complementary forces yin and yang, represented by mountains (shan) and water (shui). The highest form of good is that of water; it carries all things in its perfect righteousness. One can see Dao of life in the adaptability of the flow of water. In Lalan’s poetry, she often referred to the momentum and the stillness in the existing world. She saw the genesis of the cosmos in the everlasting motion of nature.
In a 1980 poem, Lalan writes:
Distance for intimacy, excess closeness ends in alienation.
Intimacy is hidden behind the far distance and will vanish at the departure of distance.
Motion for stillness, vice versa. Outer peace is a motion when silence is beneath every movement.
Harangue rings hollow when the actual message is not delivered with speech.
Hardness and softness are compatible, where perseverance lies in utmost softness.
There is no light and shade. Shade makes light prominent, and light in nature is shade.
Seeing outside the window and inside the painting, painting is the wall’s eyes and our heart.
Commence comes along with termination, albeit termination itself is the commencement and the two co-occur.
Fig. 8 Water
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1984
Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 55.5 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
For Lalan, abstraction had morphed into a form of art that allowed her to meditate and blend her mental state into nature, uniting Mother Earth’s energy with her brushstrokes and pouring out the organic forces she observed onto her canvas. She yearned for eternity in the stillness she captured in motion. The desert-like scene in Untitled (1994) offers a new vitality, absent from the earlier landscapes (Fig. 9). It suggests a microscopic view of a nebula that could be traced in nature; the fragile and delicate network of lines is concentrated in the centre of the composition. Each stroke is sophisticatedly painted, a flick of grated oil crayons drifting and dissolving into the pale, sandy beige abyss. Here, Lalan no longer transcribes a specific scene but translates perpetual motion in a meticulous, all-over abstract composition.
This work reveals her elevated mastery of brush and technique. The energy of the splatters and splashes is spontaneous yet balanced by an element of control, one that resulted from an accumulation of experience over forty years. Beneath her ostentatious imagery, there is always virtuous perception. Her late works manifest the core of spirituality in painting: an entrance towards the nonchalant state of mind and being. Eugene Ionesco wrote of Lalan’s work: ‘We may tend to think that is it no longer possible to invent anything new in such or such field: then all of a sudden, here comes novelty, here comes the unexpected, here comes a painter, here comes Lalan’ (Ionesco, 1966). The body of work she created is an endless metaphysical journey from a genuine artist. She enshrined the search for the deepest aesthetic to amplify the visions of immortal realms.
Tiffany Law is Assistant Curator of Asia Society Hong Kong Center.
Fig. 9 Untitled
By Xie Jinglan (Lalan) (1921–95), 1994
Oil and mixed media on canvas, 195 x 130 cm
(Image courtesy of Kwai Fung Foundation)
Selected bibliography
Elger Dietmar, ‘Paintings of Autonomous Signs’, in Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed., Modern Art: A History from Impressionism to Today, Berlin, 2004, pp. 219–31.
Valeska Gehrmann, Taoism: Chinese Customs and Beliefs, https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/Chinese_Customs/taoism.htm.
Eugène Ionesco, ‘Preface written on the occasion of exhibition Lalan’, Paris, 1966.
Kwai Fung Foundation, Hong Kong, copy of untitled poem by Lalan, obtained 14 January 2021.
James Legge, Texts of Taoism, part 1 of 2, Sacred Books of the East 39, London, 1879.
Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching, Annotated and Explained, Nashville, 2006.
Sotheby’s, ‘Memoirs of Mother’s Free Spiritedness and Aura: An Interview with Mr Jia-Ling Zao’, Lalan: Endless Dance, Hong Kong, 2019.
Rinnie Tang and Pierre Colombel, ‘The Birth of Water (La Naissance de L’eau)’, in Peintures de Lalan, Paris, 1990, pp. 4–5.
Sophy Thompson, ‘Lalan’, in Josiane Rougemont, ed., Lalan, Bangkok, 1999.
Lin Wen Zheng, ‘Introduction to the National Hangzhou Academy of Art’, Apollo, no. 13 (1934).
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