Born Xie Jinglan in Guizhou, China in 1921, she went on to study music at the Hangzhou School of Art. This early training in music and movement remained central to her artistic language throughout her life. In 1948, Lalan moved to Paris, immersing herself in the city’s avant-garde culture. She studied modern dance and electronic movement, taking influence from choreographer Martha Graham and composer Edgar Varèse. Seeking to dissolve the boundaries between disciplines, Lalan developed what she called ‘integrated art’ — a synthesis in which sound, movement and colour became expressions of the same creative impulse.
She turned increasingly to painting in the late 1950s, adopting her artistic name in 1957. Lalan’s early abstractions are characterised by vivid colour, rhythmic lines and energetic — almost calligraphic — gestures. Often painted rapidly and without preparatory sketches, these works translated the physical movement of dance directly onto the canvas. As Lalan later described it, painting was carried by ‘the interior sound and movement of the body’. In the 1970s, her Spectacles performances brought together choreography, electronic compositions and paintings at venues such as Galerie Iris Clert.
Over her career, Lalan reconnected with Chinese artistic traditions, particularly the landscapes of the Song and Yuan dynasties and Taoist philosophy. These influences reshaped her palette and compositions, with abstract forms evoking expansive, imagined landscapes suspended between figuration and abstraction. Works such as Les formes sortent du bleu et du vert (1972) — sold by Christie’s for HK$3.4 million in 2016 — reveal how she united the expressive freedom of European modernism with the poetic spatiality of Chinese painting. She died in 1995.
Today, Lalan’s work is held in major collections worldwide including the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as the Shanghai Art Museum.
LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
Abstraction
LALAN (Xie Jinglan, Chinese, 1921–1995)
Les formes sortent du bleu et du vert ( Forms come out of the blue and the green )
LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
Nuit bleu (Blue Night)
LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
Red and Blue
LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
Composition
LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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LALAN (XIE JINGLAN, 1921-1995)
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