Lalan - Catherine Kwai, Veronique Bergen

This volume is considered the most comprehensive monograph about the life and career of the female pioneer who integrated abstract painting, music, and dance, Lalan.  Born in Guizhou, Xie Jinglan (nicknamed “Lalan”) was a multidisciplinary artist trained across various art forms, including painting, music, and dance. Excelling in all such categories, Lalan united these fields in her artistic practice to create an oeuvre that epitomized “synthesized art.” Her lifelong explorations resulted in an unusual kind of exhibition/performance named Spectacle, which assimilates dance and music within her artworks. Her works can be found in important Western and Asian museums, such as the Centre Pompidou Musée National d’Art Moderne, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Shanghai Art Museum, and others.  This book reviews her entire career by selecting her most representative masterpieces and celebrating her life journey as the backdrop, between dream and drama. The materials in this book have been collected by a dedicated research team through a painstaking process lasting more than two years.   Lalan’s paintings are a melting pot of many important features inspired by traditional Chinese culture on the one hand (including the spirit of Taoism, the practice of qigong, and the essence of ink landscapes during the Song Dynasty), and Western abstract painting on the other.