Text by MOOK Scenic Spots Travel Life Network Editorial Department, compiled and reported

Eslite Gallery will present the exhibition “A Breeze from Paris” from May 31 to June 29, 2014, featuring Lalan as the central figure to showcase the brilliance of 20th-century Chinese artists in France. In addition to exhibiting dozens of Lalan’s outstanding artworks from different periods, the show also includes works by Tseng Haiwen, Pan Yuliang, Xiong Bingming, and Chang Yu, presenting the brilliant sparks generated by the encounter and collision of Eastern and Western art.

Lalan was born in 1921 into a literary family in Guizhou, China. At the age of 14, through her cousin’s introduction, she met and fell in love with Zao Wou-Ki, who was studying painting at the Hangzhou Art Academy at the time. As a result, Lalan purposely enrolled in the music department of the Hangzhou Art Academy, and the talented pair took flight together, becoming a much-told romance. Lalan and Zao Wou-Ki married in 1941 and went hand in hand to Paris in 1948. The highly talented Lalan began creating electronic music in Paris and served as Zao Wou-Ki’s muse. Although their marriage ended in divorce in 1957, it marked the beginning of Lalan’s painting career. Encouraged by her second husband, Marcel van Thienen, she took up the brush and continued creating until her passing in 1995.

The Asian art scene knows Lalan more as Zao Wou-Ki’s first wife than as an artist in her own right, but in fact, her achievements in painting are outstanding. In the early stages of her painting career, Lalan was greatly influenced by Zao Wou-Ki, leading her to start with abstract painting and draw inspiration from ancient Chinese characters. Her works feature bold lines and strong colors, conveying the artist’s pursuit of personal expression. In the 1970s, Lalan delved deeply into traditional Chinese landscape art, producing numerous landscape-themed works often featuring images of mountains and rivers, while striving for a poetic ambiance—serene and profound. In her later years, she returned to abstraction, using lighter colors and more musical brushstrokes, and began combining her own composed music, performing dance in front of her paintings.