LALAN (XIE Jing-Lan dite, Chinese artist, 1921-1995). - Lot 109

Lot 109
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Estimation :
50000 - 80000 EUR
LALAN (XIE Jing-Lan dite, Chinese artist, 1921-1995). - Lot 109
LALAN (XIE Jing-Lan dite, Chinese artist, 1921-1995). The Dancer - 1969. Oil on canvas, signed and dated on the back. Annotated "les mots muses" (?) on the stretcher, said stretcher bearing six studio stamps. H_83 cm W_65 cm In a natural wood baguette frame. Provenance: Private collection in the South of France. The authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the Lalan Archives. A certificate of authenticity may be requested by the purchaser. Note: born in 1921 in Guiyang into a cultivated family open to the world, Xie Jing-Lan - who later adopted the name Lalan - showed an exceptional aptitude for music and dance from an early age. Trained in an environment blending Chinese traditions and Western influences, she developed an independent spirit that would mark her entire artistic career. Her teenage encounter with Zao Wou-Ki was a seminal moment. Despite family opposition, their relationship continued and led to marriage in 1941, in the midst of the turmoil of the Sino-Japanese war. This intimate and artistic bond would accompany the beginnings of their careers, leading them together to Paris in 1948, at the heart of the post-war artistic effervescence. Settling in the Montparnasse district, the couple quickly moved into an avant-garde milieu. Their proximity to Alberto Giacometti, their exchanges with Henri Michaux - who introduced them to major figures such as Hans Hartung, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Jean-Paul Riopelle - placed Xie Jing-Lan at the heart of the international art scene. She also befriended the painter Sanyu, whose studio she regularly visited. At the same time, she pursued a demanding musical training at the Paris Conservatoire with major composers such as Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. Her career was further enriched by her encounter with Edgard Varèse, a pioneer of electronic music who was to have a lasting influence on her research. Fascinated by the modern choreography of Martha Graham, she also explored contemporary dance. After her divorce from Zao Wou-Ki in 1957, she pursued a singular trajectory, marked by total creative freedom, and married Marcel Van Thienen. Before devoting herself to painting, Lalan had been a dancer, an experience that profoundly influenced her work and is fully reflected in our 1969 work. Nourished by a dual culture, her painting is part of a dialogue between Western abstraction and Chinese aesthetic thought. After a period of research marked by the influence of European avant-gardes, in the 1960s she made a profound return to the sources of Chinese philosophy and landscape painting, developing a highly poetic plastic language of rhythms, breaths and silences. A profoundly interdisciplinary figure, in the early 1970s Xie Jing-Lan invented the concept of "Spectacle", a bold fusion of painting, music and dance, testifying to her desire to transcend the boundaries between the arts. Supported by French cultural institutions, she deployed this innovative form in numerous performances. Right up to the end of her life, she never ceased to bring cultures and disciplines into dialogue, pursuing a singular body of work that is both introspective and universal. Her career, intimately linked to that of Zao Wou-Ki yet profoundly distinct from it, is one of the most original expressions of artistic dialogue between China and the West in the 20th century.
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